[LINK] Peering nation-wide

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Re provider peering across the Philippines ..

Thanks for these informed thoughts, Marty, and yes, positions have
hardened quite rapidly. Also unfortunately business can often have
their way here at some expense to citizens. For one example in one
nearby, sizable, local government area, the two major satellite TV
companies have managed to have law passed making household antenna
installations illegal. So, outside free-to-air television antennas
are not legal. Hahaha. Things are not always straight forward here. 
And everyone laughs at this, and, it's a delightful, light-hearted
sort of craziness. Many cars dont have number plates, but the cops
don't have police cars, so no-one cares. And politeness is endemic.

On the peering topic another linker also sent an interesting email.
Thank you Link. Although early days I do wish to make a submission.

For folk interested in the basics of peering another linker writes:

I'm hardly an expert but here are the basics.

Peering 101
-----------

Find a neutral location

Create a Peering entity to run the place.

Peering entity obtains AS number and IP space (for BGP routing).

Each party trunks their data to the neutral location at their own cost.

Each party plugs into a common network switch. GigE or 10GigE or something
that works for all parties. You might charge more for a 10GigE connection
then for a GigE connection but basically all parties pay based on
what type of port they connect to and how many of these connections they
have at the exchange.

Each party configures BGP to talk to the peering fabric.

Charge each party a nominal monthly levy to keep the Peering entity 
running.

You can stop here if it is multi-lateral peering where all
participants will exchange traffic with each other at no further cost.

It gets more complicated if they want to be picky about which people
they will peer with at the peering exchange (bi-lateral peering) or they
expect some form of compensation if they put more traffic into the
exchange then they take out.


> Interesting debate if any Link peering experts care to advise this
> country re the best ways to peer nation-wide?

I'm a bit confused by your summary as the last of the philstar.com 
articles indicates that PLDT, the dominant incumbent, is fighting it 
tooth and nail.

> <http://www.interaksyon.com/article/7469/draft-rules-on-ip-peering-out-
ntc-hearing-expected-soon>
> <http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?
articleId=712956&publicationSubCategoryId=66>

It sounds much like the noises made in Australia around forcing the large
incumbents to peer with newer, growing networks. In 1997 Telstra was 
forced to peer with 3 others (Optus, Connect.com [now AAPT?], Ozemail [now
Verizon]) creating the "gang of four" but the unfortunate affect was a
government decreed "tier 1" group which could exclude all other players.

These points apply to both countries:
- The incumbent(s) feels that the "smaller" networks should be buying 
transit. 
- Internet exchanges exist in which "smaller" networks peer with each 
other.
- Refusing to buy transit in the absence of peering leads to trans-ocean
  "trombone" of the traffic with resulting poor performance.

Australian ISPs tend to work around this by buying "domestic transit" to 
one of the "gang of four" which is effectively access limited to all four 
of them and their customers. Full international transit is sourced 
separately and peering with other "small" networks takes care of the rest.

The plan in the Philippines sounds like it avoids some of flaws of the 
1997 ACCC decision but introduces so new ones of it's own by selecting 
the way in which peering is to be done.

This report
http://www.budde.com.au/Research/Australia-Wholesale-Internet-Peering.html
covers the Australian situation but if you don't have a lazy us$50 this 
blog from Simon Hackett covers it pretty well too
http://blog.internode.on.net/2011/05/16/peering-policy-gaps-nbn/

cheers
Marty


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