[LINK] Australian ISP Peering

Wed Mar 18 00:18:07 AEDT 2009

I've worked for two of the local 'big four' peers and for UUnet in
Europe. I had no involvement in setting peering policies, but have
seen how they work.
In Australia, we tend to assume that US ISPs get free data through
peering. This is only true so far as peering occurs through equals.
>From memory, UUnet was prepared to offer national or regional peering
by AS number where traffic was about even each way, and the applicant
peer covered the interconnect charges.
They sold, and made good coin from regional and international transit
to supply local ISPs with international links.
Typically, the ISPs they peered with were the biggest 2 or 3 in a
country, and just charged transit prices to all the small ones.
In Oz, Optus, Connect (now AAPT) and OzEmail (now IInet) set down the
first local peering agreement, and to my knowledge it still operates.
If you are a small ISP with minimal local data traffic, I suspect the
barrier to peering is that the big four peer on Gigabit pipes, and
your 1.5mbps is inconsequential. I do wonder where operators like
Webcentral fit though.
I suspect the main barrier to broader peering in Au is Telstra or one
of the others would seek a local peering point, and there are few ISPs
that could cover the fixed costs of lines in each capital city who
would see a financial benefit compared to skipping those costs and
just paying for transit at their main data centre.
>From what I understand, it is much the same in the US and Europe. So
high service, high value ISPs can still carve a niche, even though
they have slightly higher costs for local traffic (remembering the
bulk of traffic is overseas anyway).
Peering will never impact the cost of international bandwidth, well
unless you start hosting Debbie does Dallas Down Under.
Regards,
Michael Skeggs

2009/3/17 Tom Koltai <tomk at unwired.com.au>:
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: link-bounces at mailman1.anu.edu.au
>> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman1.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Geoff Huston
>> Sent: Tuesday, 17 March 2009 9:23 PM
>> To: stephen at melbpc.org.au
>> Cc: link at anu.edu.au
>> Subject: Re: [LINK] Australian ISP Peering
> <SNIP>
>> So peering is not a panacea here - it has its uses and meets some
>> objectives in this market, but it won't solve everything. This is a
>> business where economies of scale are critical to sustaining a cost
>> efficient infrastructure base, and if you attempt to perform this
>> infrastructure provisioning with private sector vehicles you will
>> always find that the base business will tend to aggregate
>> into a small
>> number of high volume operators. Now you could always attempt to
>> perform the infrastructure investment using public funds (such as
>> happened with the initial overland and undersea telegraph
>> services in
>> the late 19th century) but right now we are living out the legacy of
>> the triumph of deregulation and competitive capitalism of the
>> 80's so
>> we have the challenge of attempting to fit a whole bunch of mutually
>> incompatible concepts into a public policy framework about
>> telecommunications service provision for the next few
>> decades. Little
>> wonder that it gets confusing from time to time, and little wonder
>> that ISP players, both large and small, slide off into dark and
>> unpalatable areas of market abuse from time to time.
>>
>> I'm not sure if this diatribe has shed more light or
>> confusion on the
>> topic, but, you did ask.... :-)
>>
>> regards,
>>
>>     Geoff
>
>
> If we compare your 1994 dissertation with later revisions, there are
> minor differences.
> My question is this -
>
> With the proviso that the target was a level playing field with zero
> settlement for local data exchange
>
> Ie: all Suydney ISP's peer for free with all Sydney ISP's
> All Perth with all Perth
> Intercity Transit is NOT included
> Overseas Transit is NOT included.
>
> What rationale could Telstra possibly have in not adhering to a truly
> open MLPA Multi Lateral Peering Agreement with all comers. Surely the
> five year old Unwired Experiment has proven that the BLPA (Bilateral
> Peering) agreements that Tesltra offer at a price are more expensive
> than bandwidth to the USA. (This is not only extraordinary, but possibly
> could even be considered extortionistically opportunistic designed to
> sell E1's across the pond.)
>
> Not withstanding your comments about stability and infrastructure - lets
> discount the AUIX/SAIX/WAIX/VIX models and use Pipe Networks as our
> example....
>
> If everyone in Australia was available via Pipe Networks..... (Stable,
> secure infrastructure) - what possible motive could Telstra have in not
> peering at a local level with everyone - apart from actively ensuring
> that local E-commerce is at a disadvantage.
>
> And do you expect that policy to change overnight once PPC-1 is
> connected later this year ?
>
>
> Tom
>
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