[Air-l] Re: Data

ren at aldermangroup.com ren at aldermangroup.com
Wed May 26 08:36:09 PDT 2004


elijah wrote:
>regular old ISPs do exactly the same thing - to some 
extent, the
>university is just another ISP which can peer with whatever 
will lower its
>total costs for bandwidth and data line leases.

Indeed. The internet is essentially a group of islands 
(Autonomous Systems) and the way that packets move about is 
by hopping form island to island. A Peering arrangement is 
effectively a bridge between two islands in (almost) exactly 
the same way a Transit arrangement is – the difference being 
that in Peering the traffic is roughly the same in both 
directions so money does not change hands, whereas in 
Transit the bigger player sells to the smaller one. So hand-
off to a peer reduces overall cost. Though I’m not sure it 
impacts data line lease as the traffic from people’s 
computers to ‘the net’ i.e. the peering point, is the same. 

Peering does effect network topology as packets generally 
like to take the lest number of hops – in many cases the 
shorted route will be via the most connected island i.e. the 
most peered network, so flow will go along these lines and 
you will see big peaks at major connection points e.g. MAE 
West - this does not really impact the original question (on 
the source side) as data still comes from someone’s computer 
that is geographically sat somewhere, it does impact 
destinations, as these are predominantly hosting centres 
which tend to be clustered around interconnection points. 

Ren


---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 21:00:12 -0500 (CDT)
>From: elijah wright <elw at stderr.org>  
>Subject: Re: [Air-l] Re: Data  
>To: air-l at aoir.org
>
>
>> Ok, not to jump in with an irrelevant conversation, but 
when I talked to
>> a former CIO of a big university, he pointed out that the 
strength of
>> internet-2 was in peering, that the biggest uni's who 
join the I2
>> network will be factoring in a peering factor when their 
universities
>> are charged for internet access.
>
>regular old ISPs do exactly the same thing - to some 
extent, the
>university is just another ISP which can peer with whatever 
will lower its
>total costs for bandwidth and data line leases.
>
>
>elijah
>
>> So hypothetical only, charges would disappear and 
couldn't be tracked,
>> although traffic would of course not disappear (isn't 
that the truth).
>>
>> Denise
>
>
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