More on peering
I remember being told three years ago that, in general, internet backbone issues weren’t really a subject for regulatory involvement, and didn’t need to be. Although the last mile was a problem, the upstream fat-pipe relationships weren’t - they were all competitive and thriving. Or at least that’s what people thought.
Over the last couple of days I’ve been looking around trying to figure out what the facts are about backbones and peering. It seems that we don’t even know what we don’t know (”we” being the public). It’s an interesting area. Wikipedia has a good article on peering, but I can’t find a visualization of data (or even the data itself).
CAIDA makes clear, via kc claffy, that data about what happens on backbones is not available to us or, more importantly, to researchers. Gordon Cook says that everything about prices for backbone carriage is secret.
Why does this matter? Perhaps this is too simple, but if large ISPs (including traditional incumbent telephone companies, here or in other countries) have the market power to refuse to carry the traffic of smaller/competitive ISPs, or to condition the carriage of this traffic on agreement to particular discriminatory policies, then the neutrality problem just goes up a level. It ceases to be a “last mile” problem and becomes a backbone problem. If all arrangements carried out by large carriers are private and secret, then there isn’t even a platform for a policy discussion - traffic carried by (say) nondiscriminatory, smaller ISPs will just go more slowly.
In a way, the backbone issue (if there is one) potentially bears the same relationship to “network neutrality” that government ownership/control of spectrum bears to our current scuffles over spectrum policy: we may be missing an enormous part of the issue without knowing it. It’s as if we’re trying to describe the “issue,” the small vessel of points and counterpoints, without seeing that the vessel is housed in a gigantic, fortress-like, and mostly secret building.
(In America, as in many other places, our government controls a huge amount of spectrum without paying for it or even carrying its value on its books. Or even making precisely clear how much it really controls.)
So maybe I’m misunderstanding the importance of this issue, or maybe there really is a competitive backbone marketplace out there. But I wish there was more information about this. It seems fundamental.
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2 Responses to “More on peering”
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Hi Susan,
Just a quick comment on peering generally, and the framing we give the topic, which I'm sure you'll appreciate affects how we think about any subject.
A majority of the confusion around peering comes, I believe, from attributing ownership of the traffic to the operator. We don't say a package with a carrier or letter with a courier is theirs, but we do say:
In fact the traffic is the customer's not the network's, and we ignore that perspective at the peril of confusion.
Customers of ISPs pay to send and receive, therefore each ISP has contracted to perform that service and charge the customer accordingly. To then seek additional market dominance empowered rents for doing what they have already agreed to do is improper, particularly if it impedes the customer receiving the service paid for.
If it was the carriers traffic, the carrier should have to pay another to carry it, but when considered from the view point that the traffic is their customer's, and has been paid for, any discrimination becomes bizarre.
It would amount to the carrier degrading the service to their customer depending on source.
Since Internet service is utterly about exchanging information between customers of autonomous networks, and consequently peering as per the Wikipedia definition, not doing so is misleading the consumer about the service offered.
The view I see, working at a tier 1 provider that hasn't always been tier 1 (we used to have to pay some of the big guys for transit) is that Internet backbone is still a competitive marketplace, or actually multiple regional marketplaces (U.S., Europe, Asia, Latin America). The big guys in each region (often state-owned or otherwise specially privileged incumbents) do still try to throw their weight around in various ways, but that doesn't seem to have hindered the our ability or that of tier 2 providers like Cogent (which is nearly, but not quite, tier 1) to compete effectively for transit business.
Hamish: I don't think I understand your comment. If a customer of a tier N (N>1) provider is paying for Internet service, they have the expectation of being able to reach the entire Internet, but their provider is going to have to pay somebody for transit in order to have that reachability. If their provider fails to pay for transit and thus is unable to reach parts of the Internet, that's nobody's fault but their provider.