[86296] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: cogent+ Level(3) are ok now
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Patrick W. Gilmore)
Tue Nov 1 09:40:55 2005
In-Reply-To: <p06230902bf8d13e1e34c@[192.168.3.67]>
Cc: "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net>
From: "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net>
Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 09:40:09 -0500
To: nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Nov 1, 2005, at 7:53 AM, John Curran wrote:
> At 12:27 PM +0000 11/1/05, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
>> Hi John,
>>
>>> Even with cold-potato routing, there is an expense in handling
>>> increased
>>> levels of traffic that is destined for your network. This
>>> increase in traffic
>>> often has no new revenue associated with it, because it is
>>> fanning out to
>>> thousands of flat-rate consumer/small-business connections (e.g.
>>> DSL)
>>> where billing is generally by peak capacity not usage.
>>
>> not true for cogent tho, we know that virtually all their traffic
>> is usage based
>> transit customers
>
> The traffic from Cogent creates additional infrastructure
> requirements on L3.
> L3 may (or may not) be able to recover these costs as incremental
> revenue
> from the recipients, depending on the particulars of their
> agreements. One
> way of mitigating their exposure is to set an upper bound on
> uncompensated
> inbound traffic.
>
> Mind you, this is entirely hypothetical, as specifics of the Cogent/
> L3 agreement
> are not available. However, it is one way to let everyone "bill
> and keep" for
> Internet traffic without an unlimited exposure, and it is an
> approach that has
> been used successfully in the past.
Taking L3 & Cogent completely out of this discussion, I'm not sure I
agree with your assessment.
I think everyone agrees that unbalanced ratios can create a situation
where one side pays more than the other. However, assuming something
can be used to keep the costs equal (e.g. cold-potato?), I do not see
how one network can tell another: "You can't send me what my
customers are requesting of you."
If your business model is to provide flat-rate access, it is not _my_
responsibility to ensure your customers do not use more access than
your flat-rate can compensate you to deliver.
--
TTFN,
patrick
