[LINK] Australian ISP Peering

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Geoff Huston writes,

> enough of this old fart stuff - back to work!  ;-) Geoff

Great to see you Link, Geoff. You are, surely, an Aussie institution.

Whilst Linkers will all note, and agree, with your IPv6 concerns, may
one ask your opinions regards another issue which arose on Link today?

That issue is, Australian ISP peering. 

At http://www.isp-planet.com/business/peering_australia.html you are
quoted at some length, in the following Sep 5th 2000 item, re peering.

You are quoted from your 1998 book, when you were Telstra's Chief 
Technologist. Now you have moved on from that position, and hence
presumably have less reason to support a Telstra position, may one
ask, for Link, what your opinions are regarding Aussie ISP peering
might be now? Do you think ISP peering regulations may be in order? 

--
Can Peering Work in Australia? Are Australia's peering exchanges too 
poorly organized to compete with the ILEC's systems? Only organization 
can unseat the king. By David Braue of ispwatch.com.au [Sep 5th, 2000]   

While many Australian ISPs complain loudly about Telstra's high charges 
for data peering, one peering provider has argued that the still-nascent 
state of the Australian peering industry — and a reluctance amongst ISPs 
to contribute the money and effort necessary to effect real change — will 
continue to frustrate attempts to negotiate the better access rates they 
want so desperately. 

Small peer: With most local peering operators still running from 
relatively undeveloped data centres and lacking the organizational unity 
necessary for effective collective bargaining, small groups of ISPs can 
hardly expect to be taken seriously by larger players, says Stephen 
Baxter, general manager of Adelaide-based SE Net and a member of the 
peering discussion panel at last month's ISPCon conference in Melbourne. 

"The unfortunate realization is that we haven't got a hope in hell of 
making it happen at the moment," says Baxter. "The obvious reason is that 
Telstra doesn't want to do it, but the other reason is that the peering 
exchanges are really lacking total professionalism. Until we meet some 
ground rules about what an Internet peering exchange should be, we don't 
stand a hope in hell of actually bringing off an outcome that we all 
think is true and right, when on pure technical and organisational terms 
they could point to us and say 'you're joking.'" 

Defining a peer: Although Telstra has been repeatedly vilified for its 
refusal to renegotiate less onerous peering arrangements with smaller 
ISPs, the company's chief technologist, Geoff Huston, outlined what 
Baxter admits are quite reasonable guidelines for ISP peering in Huston's 
1998 book Strategies for Running A Competitive ISP. 

In that book, Huston identified five key attributes that he says 
are, "considered highly desirable for an exchange facility. The exchange 
should be as follows: 

operated by a neutral party who is not an ISP (to ensure fairness and 
neutrality in the operation of the exchange) 

constructed in a robust and secure fashion 

located in areas of high density of Internet market space 

able to scale in size 

operate in a fiscally sound and stable business fashion 


A continuing concern exists about the performance of exchanges and the 
consequent issue of quality of services that traverse the exchange. Many 
of these concerns stem from an exchange business model that may not be 
adequately robust under pressures of growth from participating ISPs." 

"When you look at these criteria, [local peering providers] don't fit any 
of them. All of this talk about peering and the rest doesn't mean much 
until we meet the most basic criteria," Baxter says. 

"If we fail those, nine out of ten times they'll just tell us to bugger 
off. The problem is, nobody wants to pay for [the upgrades necessary to 
provide such service levels]; you'd probably want around A$250,000 
funding per year. But exchanges all started charging next-to-nothing, 
which is the way to get people in when it's small. And they've kept the 
same funding model." 

Runnymede
For ISPs feeling frustrated by their inability to change Telstra's 
charging structure, Baxter suggests that a more constructive way of 
changing the situation — apart from getting better-organized — is to 
pursue political change through lobbying, and by simply showing state 
governments that local peering arrangements can save them money. 

"Telstra does a very good job of acting just inside the law, but there 
are other ways to achieve these outcomes," he explains. "I suggest we as 
an industry take a bottom-up approach, as opposed to a top-down. The top-
down approach is using a regulator to smack Telstra in the head, but the 
other way is to get ISPs to approach local and state governments, and say 
if they want to provide good service to their constituents that they can 
give [governments] a cut price. If the government has to pay per byte of 
information to someone connected to Telstra, they lose money. If they 
connect through a peering network, everybody wins." 

--

Cheers Geoff
Stephen Loosley
Victoria, Australia