Why don't ISPs peer with everyone?

[jerome at ceriz.fr (Jérôme Nicolle)]

2011/6/7 Jimmy Hess <mysidia at gmail.com>:

> (a) Costs of peering; ?both in terms of administrative overhead,
> ports, circuits, cabinet space,...

The cost of peering on an IXP is roughly the same as setup fees for a
new transit, and a BGP session to an IXP route server is not far from
what will a full view cost in RAM and CPU on your edges.

> (B) Loss of revenue due to peering. ?An extreme example is a very
> large ISP peering
> with a small ISP, to allow the small ISP to reach large ISP's customers.
> The large ISP loses revenue, if they provide the peering for free,
> since it would mean
> the small ISP is not paying for that transit.

Large ISPs do buy transit too. On a financial perspective, it can be
considered as "outsourcing the peering function", with a paid SLA for
this connectivity...

> And once a customer, never a peer.

Never peer with one of your peer's customer is one basic rule of
peering agreements between tier-2 and 1 networks.

It's a shame financial pragmatism makes the Internet less "meshy", and
thus more fragile...


-- 
J?r?me Nicolle