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New UUNet Policy Offers No-charge Peering

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-way-to-change dept.

Sacrifice writes "For the last seven years, no new network has been able to peer with UUNet without paying for transit. This looks to change, as they now publicly offer, in clear, publicly stated terms, their requirements for bilateral (no tribute) peering! Genuity paved the way for this three months ago with the announcement of their own publicly stated peering requirements (Genuity had a difficult time years ago with achieving bilateral peering with UUNet, and was the last major network to manage it)." Update: 01/10 02:44 PM by J : TBTF has the one good explanation that I've seen.

22 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Peering by Ross+C.+Brackett · · Score: 2

    This whole aspect of the internet is very mysterious. I mean, I can understand TCP/IP - the packets go from hop to hop, network to network and it just gets from place to place. Everyone buys bandwidth from upstream until there is no farther upstream. Then, networks have to peer with each other.

    That's where I get bewildered. How does peering work, at a physical level, and a practical level?

    Physically, I'm imagining two shacks (let's say they're respectively owned by MCI Worldcom and AT&T) next to each other in in the woods with a CAT-5 cable snaked between them. I'm sure it's something more fancy than this, but am I basically right?

    Practically, if you're an ISP, how many other "big players" do you have to make sure you're peered with in order to make it so your users can always get to any other part of the Internet whenever they want to? Who governs this interaction? From some of the other posts here, I'm getting the impression that the almighty dollar is the governing party.

    And what's the history of peering? How was it in the early days? How did it get to where it is now?

    Does anyone know of a website, or perhaps a book that explains this aspect of the Internet? It's endlessly fascinating to me, and it's one of a few areas of the Internet I don't get. That and the inner mysteries of Usenet. But that's another post for another time.

    1. Re:Peering by Brew+Bird · · Score: 3

      At a physical level, peering connections look exactly like any other type of connection. The diffrence is in how it is configured. With peering, you only get the routes of the network you are connected to. So, if I am peered with Sprint, I only get Sprint routes, and Sprint's Customers routes. Thats all, nothing else.

      A little peering history. Your government mandated public peering points into existence to try and free up the market, to help get a little competition cooking. however, technology had a hard time keeping up with demand at these internet hot spots, and public peering points soon became a serious traffic loss area for the bigger networks. (After all, with every moe, dick and larry trying to funnel traffic down that DS3 or FDDI connection at the NAP, it soon filled up!) So anyone who seriously needed bandwidth to larger networks ended up privatly peering (your 2 shacks in the woods). Of course, private peering is a lot more expensive for both parties, so the larger networks eventualy relized that no-cost peering with the smaller networks was of little or no value to them. After all, if you are UUnet peering with Joe Small Rocks ISP, he gets free access to your 100k worth of customers, and you get access to his 10 customers!

      It basicly boiled down to giving away free service to smaller ISPs for no value in return, so the larger ISPs started coming up with a set of requirments to keep the smaller ISPs from wasting thier resources.

      Things like : Be at 5 public access peering points, have a presence in XX number of states, document XXXXMb of traffic between our networks for XXhours of uptime. In other words, make us understand how it is to our mutual advantage to peer. (after all, peering relationships shoule be among peers, not big network to little network)

      You are pretty much right, the almighty dollar rules here. But, that is as it should be. We don't want the Internet to become run on the same rules as a welfare state. I believe such rules would result in the least stable service for a relativly high amount of money.

      So, bottom line - if you want no-cost peering, have a big network with lots of customers! Plan on burning a lot of money up front to build a big network and even more money to BUY transit until you have enough customers you can meet the demands for private peering. Once you meet those demands, you will get it.

    2. Re:Peering by _ganja_ · · Score: 2
      Totally agree, peering should benifit both parties and UUNets peering has *always* been open, its just that nobody knew what the requirments were :-) Furthermore there weren't really any networks large enough for UUNet to peer with where the peering would provide any advantage to UUNet.

      If you're a small little ISP you have to pay for trannsit capacity why should you get massive bandwidth free from the world's largest ISP?

      Generally it works this way: Big ISPs peer with big ISPs, medium sized ISPs peer with medium sized ISPs and pay the big ISPs for transit, small ISPs peer with small ISPs and some stupid medium ISPs plus pay the either the medium ISPs for transit (cheap) or Big ISPs for transit (more expensive).

      This news item means nothing unless you're a very large ISP (I mean large, not just think you are), you now know how much bigger you need to be to get free peering with UUNet. I think this point is proven by all the off topic crap posted regarding this article on PoPs and spam. Most /.ers don't even know what peering is.

      I think part of UUNets rational behind this is to simply stop the medium sized ISPs who think they're massive bothering them with "Look, we're really big, peer with us". Now UUNet can just say: "Do you meet this requirements?". The chances are that these ISPs are already *paying* UUNet for transit anyway so what's the chance of UUNet giving them more bandwidth for free? I'd say about none.

      To the parent poster: If you are really (and I mean really) interested in peering find a book called Internet Routing Architectures by Bassam Halabi (Cisco Press), it explains a lot of History behind the net / peerings / NAPs. It also contains a lot of information on the ins and outs of configuring routers for BGP if that kind of thing turns you on.

      --

      A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security

  2. Peering Policy has always been there by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    I know of a few companies that have been able to get private peering with UUnet over the last couple of years, however, part of the agreement is that they were NOT allowed to advertise the fact to anyone that they had it!

    You can figure out who by analyzing the RADB records.

    Just because you heard somewhere that UUNet hasn't done this in 7 years doesn't make it true. It just means the people who's networks were big enough to meet thier requirments were forbiden to discuss it.

  3. Re:Evil Troll! by hawk · · Score: 2

    >The joke, of course, is on you. If greedheads like you get your way
    >you will screw the pootch.

    Ahh, I see. You've directed all of your retirement funds to
    invest *your* money in companies that spend on infrastructure and
    give it away free, rather than those that seek a return on
    investment?

    >My mod points gave me a really hard choice here. Mark you as a troll
    >or answer your BS.

    I doubt that would have given him a problem. There are enough
    people around here that understand basic economics that your
    abuse of moderation would have been quickly undone.

    hawk

  4. Re:This effects Joe Average how? - I'll Explain by Rodney+L+Caston · · Score: 3
    Peering is what makes the internet work, (in a round-about way) the internet is nothing but various connected networks, when you peer with another network, you link to them - you have a ircut put in between you - and them, you allow traffic leaving your network, to enter thiers. think of this in terms of traceroute results, lets use PSI & Exodus for example (and for the sake humor considering they cut off peering with each other over the summer)

    To get to Exodus, from PSI (now they do not peer) a customer must travel thru another network, - this adds more hops to the path.

    I havent run a traceroute between them in ages, but if PSI is lucky, a network they peer with / also peers with Exodus - etc.

    if not, even more hops will add up.

    Now I've given the example, you can see why peering is good for ALL USERS, when your ISP peers, it makes less hops and usually faster transit between your ISP and the ISP they peer with -

    In short, peering is good for the net - peering IS the net.

    Also, after reading the article, I think it's misleading, the article is not really saying UUNET will offer free peering. Read it again :)

  5. Funny. by mrsam · · Score: 2
    The biggest honker there just has to be this:
    2. Operational Requirements

    The following operational requirements apply both to the Requester and to the WorldCom Internet Network with which it desires to enter into a settlement-free interconnection arrangement:

    ...

    2.7 Each Internet Network must be responsive to unsolicited email and network abuse complaints, as well as routing and security issues, providing a knowledgeable technician within a two-hour period after notice.

    If UUNET really intends to implement this policy, they need to immediately depeer themselves from the rest of the world. UUNET is currently at the top of Spamcop statistics. Anyone who had to deal with UUNET-originated spam knows very well that abuse@uu.net is just a big gaping sinkhole. uu.net doesn't just routinely ignore standard spam complaints. They'll ignore pretty much any complaint unless you show them a penis that's bigger than theirs. They only respond when things escalate to the point where their entire netblocks are just about to be plonked into global spam filters.

    ---

    1. Re:Funny. by Tackhead · · Score: 4
      Quoth uu.net:
      > > Each Internet Network must be responsive to unsolicited email and network abuse complaints,

      Quoth mrsam, probably after spraying coffee all over his monitor:
      > [...] abuse@uu.net is just a big gaping sinkhole.

      I don't see any contradiction. I mean, nowhere does it say that uu.net has to be responsive! It just says that that if you wanna peer with 'em, you have to be responsive.

      "Wanna peer with us? Be a good netizen and whack your spammers so we don't have to carry the traffic. But don't expect us to do do jack shit about the spam our users cram through your pipes."

      To which my response would be "I wouldn't peer in their mouths if they were dyin' of thirst", but I digress.

  6. UUNet = SpewSpewNet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    Given the current state of their spammer infestation problems, particularly on their dialup circuits, AND their apparent lack of interest in doing anything about it, I'm surprised ANYone would want to peer with them. They didn't earn the moniker 'SpewSpewNet' for nothing...

  7. Re:They can only afford it because... by Tackhead · · Score: 5
    >Because they're now sticking it to their wholesale customers, the ISP's who rely on their POPs.

    Good point - I've long suspected that uu.net isn't really interested in the business of POP-leasing. It'd explain a lot of things, not just the spam problem. (Moderators - mod the parent of this post up!)

    With the impending doom of PSINet, however, they may be able to jack up the rates high enough to make it profitable again. Goodness knows Worldcom's desperate enough for revenue.

    (OK, useful commentary over, now on to more kvetching about the dreck uu.net shovels into my mailbox every friggin' day...)

    If you're an ISP, consider finding alternate arrangements. More and more uu.net dialups are finding their way into routers' blocklists every day as individual admins give up on uu.net dialups as nothing but a spam source.

    I'm off to tweak Apache into displaying "If you're reading this, you're on a uu.net POP. Go tell your ISP to lease their POPs from someone a little more reputable" whenever a user comes in from 63.[wholebunchastuff]...

    Yeah, I know, uu.net probably leases the same POP to multiple ISPs and does authentication at the RADIUS server level, so you can't just say "63.foo.bar.baz is msn.com, 63.foo.bar.qux is earthlink.net".

    But dialsprint arguably had the same problem (I don't think they're exclusively Earthlink?), and went from 25000+ spams a day reported to Spamcop down to nearly nothing upon blocking port 25. Sure, it took six months of half the 'net bitching at them 24/7, but they finally relented, and the spamload dropped within 24 hours of implementation. Looks like all their spammers have since migrated to uu.net, who remain unresponsive after three years.

  8. Re:Requirements by Tackhead · · Score: 2
    > How many ISPs do you know of (no, AOL is *not* an ISP, it's an advertising agency . . .) that even come close to this one requirement

    Buggered if I know. Anyone remotely big enough has already been swallowed up.

    If AOL owns equipment (as opposed to just leasing POPs and assigning them .aol.com DNS info), they might qualify, but I can't imagine why they'd bother. I'd put good money that the vast majority of AOL's traffic is just bits being shovelled from one part of AOL's network to another. Why peer? Their users are just on a really big LAN.

    Of course, if AOL merely leases POPs, then that "internal to AOL" traffic is a heck of a lot. But if AOL is mostly leased POPs from ISPs, then they can't meet the geogrpahic requirements.

    Hmm... if it's half-and-half, though... maybe they are the one. Didn't AOL pick up a big pile of modem banks and other ISP toys when they bought out Compuserve a few years back?

    Other ideas - maybe the Mindspring/Earthlink agglomeration? Or the biggest-ass uu.net "reseller", good ol' msn.com?

  9. Well, this *is* a change. by AtariDatacenter · · Score: 2
    UUNet's policy used to be "if you were as big as us, you could peer with us for free". Of course, that policy was pretty good, except for the fact that nobody is as big as UUNet. So now, after realizing that they were no longer the darlings of the peering world, they've lowered their standards.

    Kind of odd, but it sounds like the dating practices of some people I know. Therefore, I offer the theory that peering is like dating, and UUNet *really hates* a blind date.

  10. peering != transit by DMC · · Score: 2

    ok, there are several requirements for peering, and peering does not mean that people get transit.

    for one, before you can exchange bgp routing information with another provider, you must goto a registry (ARIN for the US), and apply for an Autonomous System Number (ASN). there is a $500/yr. fee for this. you have to prove to ARIN that you deserve one of these numbers.

    secondly, peering is when two networks get together and exchange their network routing information with each other, but only *their* network information.

    for example, we have isps a, b, c, and d. a connects to b, b connects to c, and c connects to d. if b and c peer, c cannot get to a and b cannot get to d. if b buys transit from c, then b can get to d.

    it all depends on what you allow the networks you exchange traffic with to see. peering just lets others terminate traffic on your network, but not through your network. transit is a customer service that allows a network to traverse your network to get to another.

    therefore, this will have zero impact on spam levels as most spam houses do not qualify for peering. even if they do, they only get to pass traffic to uunet, not through uunet.

  11. Silly Bird! by twitter · · Score: 2
    There are enough people around here that understand basic economics that your abuse of moderation would have been quickly undone.

    Your right. Even _ganga_ who's been smoking too much, knows beter. That's why he's a troll.

    Hawk, however, would not have bought Bell shares before Bell was regulated. That's why I have to answer trolls from time to time.

    --

    Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.

  12. Re:And free spam! by PD · · Score: 2

    UUNet is probably just doing this to protect the spammers. They are just calling the spammers peers and carrying their shit for free.

    --
    If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
  13. Free shell! by Pish+Tosh · · Score: 2
    Aha! Here's the reason they wouldn't do bilateral peering -- nobody would give UUNET staff a shell account:
    The two Internet Networks must exchange with each other prior to any settlement-free interconnection agreement a free shell or PPP account
  14. Requirements by Kreeblah · · Score: 2

    > The Requester shall operate facilities capable of terminating customer leased line IP connections onto a router in at least 50% of the geographic region in which the WorldCom Internet Network with which it desires to interconnect operates such facilities. This currently equates to 15 states in the United States, 8 countries in Europe, or 2 countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

    Hmmm. If they're just trying to hook their larger competitors into a deal, what good does it do anyone else? They forbid peering with their networks through anyone else (presumably companies already peering). Anyone who's got enough equipment to cover half UUNet's geographic area is going to be pretty lonely at the top. How many ISPs do you know of (no, AOL is *not* an ISP, it's an advertising agency . . .) that even come close to this one requirement?

  15. More info by Garpenlov · · Score: 5

    There's a more detailed explanation of what this really means at http://www.interesting-people.org/200101/0015.html . (Stolen from the NANOG discussion today, the thread starts here: http://www.cctec.com/maillists/nanog/current/msg00 681.html).

    --
    --- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
  16. Yeah, it's offtopic. So what? by swordgeek · · Score: 2

    But am I the only one who read this as "New UUNet policy offers no-charge peeing?"


    --

    "People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
  17. They can only afford it because... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5

    Sure, UUNet is offering to do peering for free. Why? Because they're now sticking it to their wholesale customers, the ISP's who rely on their POPs. The free ISP's are tanking. Their only real competitor in quantity and quality, PSINet, is going under fast. Mark my words, they're going to stick it to the ISP's that rely on them; don't be surprised if you see the providers that count on UUNet start jacking their prices up, just to break even. I work for one of those ISP's... UUNet started ramping up their wholesale prices last month.

  18. Re:This effects Joe Average how? by burris · · Score: 2
    It seems to me that bandwidth is a horrible commodity these days - everyone has too much to spare - you almost have to give it away. (Well, not quite - but its a far sight better then 3 or 4 years ago)
    Tell that to the victims of the Slashdot Effect.

    Burris

  19. They faced anti-trust lawsuit in Europe over this by Pengo · · Score: 3


    To get to my servers in our London datacenter from a UUNet connection, it covers about 15 hops that include a trans-contenental hop to DC up to New York, back over AboveNet fiber to London again and response does the same path.

    It's a joke.

    A lot of major ISP's will buy their bandwidth from UUNet and let the other bandwidth providers PEER. But, as you can see quickly, it makes a bit of sense, from the business perspective, to do business with UUNet. If you don't your customers will be traversing back to the United States to see your datacenter!

    Now, according to the people at abovenet, UUNet has to start to comply do to the fact that other hosting companies (colt, exodus, abovenet, etc) as well as all the local isp's etc, that belong to Ripe, could quit peering with UUNet and that would cause UUNet a LOT of grief for UUNet and their customers.

    Anyway, think of it as a bandwidth Union.

    Anyway, this is a bit of a long rant.. but I am a frustrated ex-uunet customer that has moved to another ISP looking for non-monopolistic support and service.



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