Re: Buy tier 1 peering for only $15 million

[Charles Sprickman <spork () inch com>]

On 20 Apr 2000, Sean Donelan wrote:

> Its amazing the net works at all.
>
> The reality is I think it would be very unusual if UUNET terminated
> Genuity's or Sprint's peering agreement just because the ownership
> changed.  If UUNET wouldn't do it in the case of those cases, they
> would have a difficult time explaining to DOJ why they would terminated
> a different provider's peering agreement if its ownership changed.

In the Genuity (meaning Genuity->BBN->GTEi->Genuity) case, while it didn't
appear that any peering arrangements were terminated, they did go "stale".

Whether this is GTE's way of saving a few bucks or the other guy's, I
can't say (hell who can, it's under NDA), but in the end customers suffer
as the acquired companies' original peering links get saturated and stay
that way for a year or longer.  I'm assuming there must be some political
crap going on behind the scenes, as when it got to a certain point it
appears that Genuity/GTEi/BBN started buying transit from Sprint for 
AS3847.  Why AS3847 wouldn't buy transit from AS1 is beyond me, but I'm
guessing it's not an operational decision.

The point being, if network A is acquired by network B, I can tell you
from firsthand knowledge that A may never see the advantageous peering
arrangements B has, and furthermore, A's peering may slowly rot and turn
to crap.

Charles