[79771] in North American Network Operators' Group
Partial Transit (was Re: OpenTransit (france telecom) depeers cogent)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Deepak Jain)
Thu Apr 14 19:04:23 2005
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2005 19:00:20 -0400
From: Deepak Jain <deepak@ai.net>
Reply-To: deepak@ai.net
To: Patrick W Gilmore <patrick@ianai.net>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <58c005d47ce24f06303d2f6e570665ca@ianai.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
> And if they don't get their collective acts together, I am certain they
> will both lose a lot of customers.
[Hijacking the thread here a bit]
I think this is a good point you brought out. Neither provider is
providing _full_ transit to their customers. If this becomes acceptable
to a set of customers [say the multihomed ones] then providers will have
to set a new price point probably significantly lower than the price
point today for "partial transit". In this case, partial transit is
defined by the provider as the set of ASes they may or may not have
connectivity to at a certain point in the contract -- rather than the
other case of partial transit where the customer decides what ASes are
interesting.
I think both providers in these depeering conflicts would be unhappy
with where the customers would price this new partial-transit level of
service at. Essentially, the responsibility of maintaining
full-connectivity is pushed further onto those who have 2 connections..
now they need 3 or more to ensure they have 2 reliable/consistent paths
to each destination of interest. I for one think that the providers that
force their customers into this role should not be compensated at the
same level as the providers that do a much better job of universal
connectivity.
In other words, "break routes at your own risk." Smart customers will be
watching [sooner or later ;)]..
disclaimer: I am not a customer of cogent, teleglobe, opentransit, and
most companies that practice rabid peering discussions -- even for layer
1/2 transport if I can help it.
Deepak Jain
