RE: Qwest Transit

["Gironda, Andre" <agironda () ebay com>]

I meant any sales guy selling transit would "like to"
ask for strict traffic ratios, while in reality, they
don't actually do this.

Your email is right on otherwise.  I do believe that
many transit offerings in the past and currently
require some kind of strict traffic ratio to *some*
companies.  If you still don't think so, drop me an
email offline and we can chat more about it.

-dre

> Thats a mighty fine crack pipe you're smoking from.
>
> The majority of 95th percentile providers that I am aware of will
> charge you only for whatever is higher, inbound OR outbound (the notable
> exception to this being Exodus, who added in+out and THEN took 95th
> percentile, to extract every last penny from your pocket).
>
> Infact depending on the provider you choose, you might even be able
> to strike some better deals based on your ratios. For example, rumor
> has it that Google struck a great deal with AboveNet because all their
> inbound traffic (from spidering) helped balance out AboveNet's
> peering links (I don't know if that story is accurate or not, but
> it has a ring of truth to it).
>
> To my knowledge Cogent is the only provider who asks for traffic
> ratios on their transit connections. The reason? Probably because
> Cogent is already taking a massive massive loss on anything they
> must transit. Their only chance to make money at the end of the day
> is to get as much peering as quickly as possible (hence their buying
> spree of "hosed" companys who just happened to have lots of legacy
> peering), and since they are answerable to their peers for their
> ratios they must pass on those requirements to their customers.
>
> It's interesting to note how much inbound traffic is "in demand"
> by hosting providers. With the breakup of @Home into many regional
> cable companies, most of whom havn't the slightest bit of clue how
> to build a network let alone a backbone, the traffic profiles change
> greatly. My prediction is that a lot of traffic which used to be
> peered into @Home at "major exchange points" will turn into transit
> connections from other providers. Unfortunately for the cable
> companies, the people who they could get the best deals from (the
> "mostly hosters") tend to be highly based around the "major exchange
> points" cities (to most efficiently pump traffic into the rest of
> the internet), not the "rest of the world".
>
> -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras () e-gerbil net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
> PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177  (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA  B2 46 B3 D8 14
> 36 FE B6)