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Australia Investigates Peering Practices
Anonymous Sniper writes "The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission today announced that it will hold a public inquiry into whether an Internet interconnection [peering] service should be regulated. This would mean the big National ISPs would have to pay smaller ISPs for traffic originating within their networks, which means everyone's routing tables would become more efficient, and cheaper for the smaller ISPs. This would also set a significant international precedent. Horray for the ACCC and Allan Fels - the same people who made Region-Free DVD players legal here."
I know i didnt get this, so i think this is the important info:
"There are some apparent curiosities with current interconnection arrangements. If I am connected to a smaller ISP and I send an email to my friend at one of the four larger ISPs, the larger ISP will generally charge my smaller ISP for sending the email. However, when my friend at the larger ISP sends me a return email, my smaller ISP will have to pay the larger ISP once again".
ya, that dosnt sound real fair
Consumer Lapdog, not watchdog.
You don't GET PAID driving down a toll road one way, do you? :-)
No, but you usually don't have to pay to get off the road either. The complaint here is that each packet is charged twice -- once to the ingress network, and once to the egress network.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Australia is notoriously regulation happy (yesterday sent off $100 fine for NOT voting in the election - that's how regulated we are.)
However we have a champion of the poor dispossessed geek in Allan Fels. The ACCC is the counterbalance to the Australian authoritarianism and big business, and actually works quite well, as it has teeth and a fearless leader.
All credit to the ACCC for taking on a difficult and messy problem.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
The situation in Australia is that A is "Telstra", and B and C are "everyone else".
Telstra also owns 100% of the installed base of copper lines in Australia, and about 90% of the installed base of fibre optic capacity, so if B and C decide that they want to talk to each other directly they almost always have to lease carrier services from Telstra... which has set the tarrifs so that the cost of directly linking is very similar to the cost of sending transit through Telstra in the first place.
The monopoly sitation with respect to installed telecommunications infrastructure distorts the way the peering arrangements you have described occur. The Australian situation is similar to what you would have had in the US if AT&T were never broken up.
For long-haul and metropolitan peering, US ISPs can obtain competitive bids from any of a number of CLECs and national carriers, or they can dig-up the sidewalks and install their own fibre. In Australia, digging up the sidewalk for laying cable is illegal without a Government-sanctioned carrier license, and there is very little in the way of competitive telecommunications infrastructure, so Telstra effectively becomes the sole provider.
The situation is slowly changing, but it's a very fragile ecosystem at the moment. Almost all of the Telstra competitors are either in the infancy or in bankruptcy... so if you were a major ISP, would you think that peering was an economically viable long-term option?
Finally, Telstra themselves never peer with anyone -- As far as they're concerned, every single other ISP in Australia, including the likes of Worldcom, falls into the "customer" category. Oh, hang on, there is one exception: about five years ago, the ACCC forced Telstra into peering arrangements with OzEmail and Optus (the number-2 and number-3 ISPs at the time). The terms of those arrangements remain a commercial secret, and no further peering arrangements have ever been entered by Telstra.
- mark
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I tried an internal modem, but it hurt when I walked.
Market regulation and trade restrictions are only "commie" if you're an American, whereby you pretend you don't have any (even though you do, heavily), force everyone else to abolish them, and thus stuff your own coffers even further.
No. To have responsive and responsible politicians, you have to create competition. In the current duopoly+irrelevants, the situation is barely better than in the US. It's just when the Labral Party gets elected, they can say that seeing as a majority of 85%95% people voted for them, they have a Mandate to introduce things they promised never to introduce. Also, our system is essentially geared up to give a party (or coalition) an essential dictatorship for a term; this is why we're going to war with an actual dictatorship. Sounds intelligent, ja?
Look out!
And there are many regional IXes, besides things like the AUSBONE. WAIX, the Western Australian IX, is a good example of this done fairly well. Almost every ISP with a presence in the state has a presence, as well as several other big transport providers (Singtel, Comindico, etc).
:) is difficult at best. The WAIX has several fairly well maintained lists of resources, many which local ISPs list on their websites. This provides user incentive.
... and that is pretty much Australian Internet Exchanges 101... from my uneducated point of view of course :)
There are a few main problems with Australian peering. First, certain big, nasty corporations profit too much from providing rip-off transit services by refusing to peer with IXs. Secondly, said companies have really stupidly designed broadband solutions involving tunneling most traffic interstate -before- providing endpoint connectivity. Thus local peering is impossible thanks to stupid design. Minus one for incentive.
The second issue is one that this will hopefully help address - BGP size. Unfortunatly, Australian BGP feeds are notoriously poluted thanks to various hacks and tricks in our national transit networks. This causes everyone a headache, as keeping a full BGP feed on a router (for both routing -and- accounting puposes) is expensive. Route tables are pretty memory hungry, and most backbone infrastructure is still driven by Cisco routers. Extra ram is not cheap, assuming you have the grunt to hold the table anyway.
The third problem is consumer oriented. Australian ISPs -have- to make money currently because Transit is expensive here. Even with this change, transit will still be far more expensive than in most other places in the world. While solutions to this are being worked on (new links and companies trying to bypass the traditional monopolies), this means Australian consumers are almost always traffic capped and either shaped or billed after a 3-6gb allowance.
It's not 1gb, but it's still a pain. Now, the problem is that in Western Australia we are lucky. Most ISPs give free access to the WAIX for their customers. This is fast and a major cost cutter for everybody. The IX has a lot of excellent resources - mirrors abound for everything.
However this does not happen in most other states. Or to a limited extent. Part of this is the age-old ingress/egress problem (just because a traceroute going OUT, eg a http -request- goes via a IX, the charged incoming data usually won't) presenting both confusion and billing problems. This leads to the second part, where most IXs, eg AusBone, do -not have a well maintained list of freely peered resources available-.
Billing is a pain for ISPs in other states as it's very hard to tell if something is freely available, and providing this as a marketing ploy (technically IXes are good... netadmins will be happy, finance may be happy - but given the outlay for ram for BGP, etc, -somebody- has to convince marketing it's a good idea
AND A MAJOR GROWTH POINT. Users, if provided with a list of resources available at a freely exchanging peering point, are more likely to try and convince their providers to participate. It's simply.
Actually there are a few not-for-profit peering points in Australia. I am the Technical Manager of WAIX (West Australian Internet eXchange) and we are the largest public IX in Australia (by number of participants AND amount of data exchanged) and we are non-profit. WAIX (www.waia.asn.au/waix) is run by the WA Internet Association (www.waia.asn.au), a non profit association for the Internet community in WA. The South Australian Internet Association runs SAIX (www.saia.asn.au), a smaller not for profit exchange in Adelaide, SA. Ausbone (www.ausbone.net) is also non-profit and has points in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. There is now also a new company running peering points in a few states, Pipe Networks (www.pipenetworks.com) are present in Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney iirc - however they are not run on a non-profit basis but are proving to be fairly popular. Over here at WAIX we have *every* ISP in WA peered either directly or via another participant with the exception of Telstra, Primus and Worldcom. Our large peers include the likes of iiNet/Eftel/Westnet who are by far the largest three ISPs in WA, the entire WA Government, all WA Universities, Singapore Telecom (and Optus via Singtel), Comindico, Connect.com.au, Pacific Internet, Netspace and Swiftel. (Complete list at http://mrtg.waia.asn.au/mrtg) So I guess in short, no we do not need more exchanges - we can work with what we have now, but we do need pressure applied to the large national backbones to force them into peering - how they could possibly justify not peering with WAIX with its massive number of peers I don't see. As a side not we (WAIX) are attending an industry forum on Internet Interconnection this week in Sydney to discuss peering matters with the various telcos and large ISPs, all substantially large ISPs in .au have been invited, as have the major exchanges. Interesting enough this meeting was instigated by Telstra via ACIF (The Australian Communications Industry Forum) prior to this announcement from the ACCC, so I think its fair to assume Telstra is aware that they are going to have to take a bit of a more serious look at peering - or at least look as if they are interested!
Also worth a mention is that we do not expect the major backbones to peer their entire network, strictly speaking we require people to peer what is financially viable for them - for some peers (Comindico & Singtel for example) actually do make their entire networks visible to the exchange, but we would be more than happy with a WA-only Telstra peer with WAIX, and I'm sure SAIX would be happy with a SA-Only telstra connection.
Gavin