ISPs Wary of Peering Crossfire

Consumer awareness
From the consumer's point of view, the stakes are also high, since an outage could have a potentially serious effect on their business. It is for this reason that consumer groups and some lawmakers are calling for protections against possible problems like that caused by the dispute between Cogent Communications and Level 3 Communications.

Congressman Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) says it may be time for a serious look at rewriting the nation's telecommunications laws. In his view, the government may have to step in to ensure the interconnection of networks at rates that are reasonable.

Boucher supports the idea of having the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) make a determination in any billing disputes which cannot be resolved by the companies involved. Under his plan, the FCC would not directly govern network interconnections, but would enforce rules guaranteeing that prices and agreements are reasonable.

Supporters say it is time that the government to jump in and protect consumers. They argue that the Internet is much too important to business, and to daily life, for it to be threatened by a breakdown in negotiations between private companies.

Opponents say government intervention will only add a new layer of problems, potentially destroy any hope for private negotiations, and open the whole process to political maneuvering and in-fighting.

"I think we are pretty good at self-regulating," commented Meadows. "[Government intervention] would just be an added complication to the arrangement. It may not be a bad idea to set some criteria for a peering arrangement, but for the most part we are all really good about talking to one another and what the criteria should be for a particular arrangement to come to a mutual agreement."

The ISPs respond
What's the poor ISP to do? Most agree that every ISP needs to have more than one backbone.

"You must strive to have multiple agreements, so if one does not perform or there is a business disagreement, you do not cut your lifeline," said Savageau. "ISPs cannot operate in a vacuum. To do their job and to serve their customers, they must be interconnected."

He also advises ISPs to consider locating in a facility like One Wilshire. "We have every major ISP in the world in this building [One Wilshire]. Once they have worked out an agreement, it can be as easy as plugging in a patch cable to effect a connection between two networks. If they are in our building, ISPs can do their peering agreements on the fly. If they have more than 20 peering agreements, then they should have a presence in a facility like One Wilshire."

"For the smaller ISP, it's all about connectivity—that's where their value is. Without it, how can they be in the business at all?" said Meadows. "You always want to work with a number of different partners—partnering arrangements are key. The challenge is going to be the pricing pressures. If you are a smaller ISP, you are going to much more likely to compete on price."

As a buyer of wholesale bandwidth from multiple Tier 1 carriers, Charles LaPadula, chief operating officer at uplinkearth, says "peering agreements are important when deciding which carriers to work with."

In his view, any provider who does not peer with other Tier 1 carriers cannot effectively route their customer's traffic. "In addition, other factors, such as the amount of peer traffic that gets routed through their backbone can adversely affect their networks responsiveness. We use various tools to analyze traffic patterns that effect how BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routes traffic through different carrier's backbones and the overall 'effectiveness' of those network segments."

When evaluating a potential carrier, LaPadula takes into consideration the quality of the provider's backbone, the cost for the service, and the provider's "interoperability with other network backbones including who their peers are, where they peer with them, and who they have peering agreements with."

— End

 

1. ISPs Wary of Peering Crossfire

2. The problem: pay to play

3. The ISPs Respond