[Air-l] Re: ITU costings

[Bram Dov Abramson]

M.Allen at exchange.curtin.edu.au:
>Speaking to people in Washington prior to AoIR, I also heard about the
>international net charging saga. At least from the perspective of DC
>bureaucrats, the attempt to change the charging to more 'equitably'
>represent the rest of the world's view was run by Australia's main
>telecommunications company Telstra.

Yes -- I think EuroISPA (association of European ISP associations) first 
put this on the table, but Telstra was certainly the first to take the ball 
and run with it, and Washington DC was the place they did it, I believe in 
the context of the FCC's process on the international settlements 
regime.  APEC's pulling this through diplomatic channels I think happened 
subsequently, in part when other carriers in the region took up the clarion 
cry.  I talk about this a bit at 
<http://www.telecomreform.net/volume2/#statistics>, but -- full disclosure, 
I suppose -- have been trying to pull these thoughts together in an article 
for a while now.  I'd like to get back to it in a month or so, and so 
thoughts are very warmly encouraged ...

>The USA took a very dim view of this; the view in DC is that it was 
>motivated purely by commercial self-interest from Telstra, rather than any 
>desire to pursue reforms that might benefit customers.

This view extended a fair bit beyond DC, I think; even into the nether 
reaches of Telstra.  Most/many of the tech side folks running various 
networks, for example...

>It is also worth considering the way in which ISPs cooperate to save money
>by peering and caching, trying to limit the number of requests for
>information that have to be sent overseas, rather than being handled
>locally.

Yup.  That's a much better solution.

cheers
Bram