On Sunday, December 18, 2011 12:32:03 AM Matthew Petach
wrote:
> I've been able to negotiate peering+transit relationships
> with providers, but only by threat of total revenue loss;
> ie "we currently pay you $x million/year; we want your
> on-net routes as settlement-free routes, and will
> continue to pay for off-net transit traffic. Otherwise,
> we will be transferring all that revenue to your
> competitor, X"
If the customer is taking these on-net routes via an
exchange point or private peering arrangement, this should
be fairly easy to do.
If they choose to take it over the same link as their off-
net service, not only does the provider need to support a
visible way in which these services can be separated over
the same wire, but it may also not make much sense for the
customer as there is potential for on-net traffic to hog the
link, making the case to upgrade the link for traffic that
may not necessarily incentivise them to do so. But it's hard
to judge this one, especially if the ISP is large with tons
of other on-net customers "talking" to the customer
negotiating such an arrangement.
I can see ISP's accepting to do this if the ratio of on-
net:off-net traffic is disproportionate, in favor of more
off-net traffic.
> This tends to be effective only for
> content providers, though, where the outbound traffic
> dominates,
> and you don't care if the inbound bits are coming
> over the "pay for" pipe vs the "settlement free" pipe.
It's also mostly useful where the ISP is sufficiently large
in a meaningful way for their on-net routes to make any
sense to the downstream customer negotiating such an
agreement.
> If you're an inbound-heavy shop, though, this won't
> really buy you much benefit. (And, if the revenue
> point isn't in the $x millions/year for the transit
> provider, they're more likely to just shrug and say
> "too much hassle...please, go be a headache
> for our competitor" rather than configuring a
> dual relationship like that--so it really only works
> for higher-volume relationships.)
Maybe what you meant to say is "if the revenue point isn't
high enough" :-).
Relatively, different ISP's may be kings in their part of
town, but still be small enough to accept fewer dollars for
such a deal.
On the whole, I can envisage cases where trying to fix this
"peering with customers" issue can end up causing
inadvertent competition with exchange points.
Mark.
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
