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New UUNet Policy Offers No-charge Peering
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
> > 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.
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?
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.
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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