[Air-l] peering post

[Nancy Paterson]

hello all,
not sure how or even if its ok to reply but here goes,

Bram, you missed ENRON (the largest failure in corp history)
its not clear to what extent their engaging in bandwidth trading contributed
to their demise but it really is not relevant - ENRON was a significant corp failure. They created the first bandwidth trade.

> UNTANGLING THE NET -
> Bandwidth brokerage, arbitrage and the
> creation of a commodity market in packet-based bandwidth led to
> financial failures partly as a result of failing to consider the
> basic interconnectedness or the internet.

>Both of these propositions might need a bit more thought.

>Regarding the first proposition: it's a bit hard to know what you mean by
>bandwidth brokerage, arbitrage, and commodity market -- they're each
>descriptors for very broad classes of phenomena.  If you mean that there
>were lots of buyers and sellers and that competition was based mostly on
>price then sure, that happened.
>But -- and especially in the domain of "packet-based bandwidth", by which
>it sounds like you intend "Internet bandwidth" more specifically -- if you
>mean that there were well-organised institutional or organisational
>mechanisms like bandwidth trading floors for commodities trading in the
>form of third-party transactions by people who neither produce nor consume
>Internet bandwidth, then this might need some more digging.  Band-X (that
>piece is now part of Arbinet) and Invisible Hand Networks represent two
>pieces of that puzzle.  But they hardly represent a very significant part
>of any Internet bandwidth market.

transit IS peering - just for fee

> Internet peering agreements provide international networks the
> ability to function.

>I don't know.  Peering has been really important, and is still kind of
>important.  But surely most bilateral BGP relationships are ones of
>transit, not peering -- particularly at the international level.
>Quantifying the extent to which this is so would be a valuable
>contribution, I think.
>I suspect that that has much more to do with financial failures, than an
>inability to understand the Internet's interconnectedness.  Fred
>Goldstein's and Daniel Reingold's books are two really nice accounts of
>that story.  I understand Om Malik's is, too, but I have not read it and
>can't say.  In any case, there are quite a few.

> This research proposes to examine peering agreements over x#
> of years and to look at the potential for the development of
> transparency in peering agreements.

>Don't get me wrong, though!  This is one of a number of important areas to
>look at.  I question whether it is the most significant or even an
>extremely significant cost driver, relative to others, in the
>international context in which you want to operate -- I suspect that other
>cost drivers, most of them related to state-sponsored chokeholds, tend to
>be both more determinative, and highly connected, to this issue.  But
>there is lots to be said and lots being said on this topic, with a number
>of interesting approaches in recent years to try and bring transparency to
>this domain.

Thanks for the book references
I'm not looking at anti-trust but at transparency in peering agreements
- and how this may be able to happen

>Apart from the well-known efforts in the context of antitrust actions in
>the U.S. and in Europe and, of course, the EuISPA/APEC/ITU meme, see
>particularly actions at the federal level in Australia.  In the Canadian
>context, the CRTC's Telecom Monitoring reports have addressed this issue
>to a very limited extent, particularly in years past (the first 3 issues),
>but some very important efforts in BC (BCNET's Transit Exchange model) and
>Alberta (via SuperNet) speak directly to this issue, and probably due in a
>domestic context -- as do multiple U.S. efforts at the state level, I
>suspect -- something similar to what I understand the World Bank has been
>trying to put together around the EASSy project.

Nancy Paterson