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. /John
