Slashdot Mirror

One you can look up readily is the AOL transit data network requirements for settlement free peering: http://www.atdn.net/settlement_free_int.shtml And if you don't meet those requirements, you have to pay for ATDN peering if you still want direct access. I suspect most other providers are similar, however I use ATDN as the example because they publish this information.

One you can look up readily is the AOL transit data network requirements for settlement free peering: http://www.atdn.net/settlement_free_int.shtml And if you don't meet those requirements, you have to pay for ATDN peering if you still want direct access. I suspect most other providers are similar, however I use ATDN as the example because they publish this information.

Uh, you believe that line of bullshit? Shame on the mods for making the parent +5. Settlement-free peering (generally) exists because if two providers were to pay for connections to each other, only exchange/allow internal routes, and the usage was roughly the same both ways, they'd be paying the other the same amount and thus cancel out monetarily.

Sprint and the others hope that the disruptive Cogent would disappear and seem to try to put them down every (legal) chance they get. Cogent tries to make some noise and even the playing field with by going against the telecoms.

I don't really think of AOL as a telecom, so I'm not sure how that validates your theory. The ATDN peering requirements are quite clear.

Yes, and the bits will get from their fiber to the Internet via MAGIC.

No, no, they don't. Those bits would travel to the internet via Peering Agreements with Tier 1 ISP's. Bandwidth that is effectively paid for by the bit. Tier 1 ISP's don't pay eachother to swap data, because each considers traffic from the other to be just as important as its own.

Interestingly enough, if municipalities were to bond together to form a network large and important enough (maybe they could buy a couple /8's from Ford or whoever) to contain enough traffic to meet the absurd "settlement free" peering agreement requirements put forth by the cartel we know as Tier 1 ISP's... now that would be interesting.

There are not many aol users anymore.(dialup)
But that does not mean aol went away. They do own this http://www.atdn.net/

ITYM "AOL can't be slashdotted." You'd need one hell of a pipe to cause problems for these guys.

It takes more to market software than it does to write it. Obviously, this may not be true for items sold on shareware chennels, but it is otherwise mostly true.

So -- running those servers doesn't cost AOL much. (They could put it on ATDN.) A skeleton staff of developers and QA doesn't cost much either (and hey, they could always offshore it :-p). This skeleton crew would ensure that AOL's long term interests are broadly met by the moz.org crew.

On the other hand, AOL would save money is by choosing not to release commercial, AOL/Netscape branded browsers based on Gecko. It would save money in not marketing and promoting it. It would even save money on documentation, evangelisation and user support. This would give MS a reason to stay honest, because AOL would still have the flexibility of hiking their commitment to moz the moment they felt MS started playing dirty. AOL gets max. ROI on min. investment.