Slashdot Mirror
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 thought it was going to be an article telling me I can't get no more warez
So long as any regulating does not remove our right to seek and destroy those who run horrendously poor peer's like Sprint.
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
Anything that goes to help out the smaller guys is a good thing. After all, the big guys gobble the little ones up, and then give crappy service for an ever increasing price.
Perhaps this will let these beloved little IPSs survive just a little bit longer.
Anything to keep the internet how it should be is a good idea, and it is nice to see the Aussie gov't protecting capitolism by leveling the playing field. After all, more compeition = better experience for every consumer.
Anything that leads to a more distributed internet is a Good Thing, IMHO. Lack of centralization is the biggest reason why the net has been successful, but recent trends are disturbing (eg: ICANN). OTOH, the US-centeredness of the internet has decreased greatly since the early days, which is good. Another thing: with the growth of permanent connections worldwide as against dialup, more and more of the average Joes will host their webpages on their own machine (like me :)), as against uploading it to some free server, which would typically be in the US. So maybe things are going to get better.
The small ISPs aren't paying for the large ISPs backbone, and the usage flows both ways through it.
:-)
You don't GET PAID driving down a toll road one way, do you?
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Slashdot poster.... in favor of regulation...... brain melting....
Everything that was once directly lived has receded into a representation. -debord
This is just more commie market regulation.
Everyone knows Free Markets means Freedom!
Market regulation is bad right?
No, market regulation is neither bad nor good...it is simply a necessity, much as police are a necessity when large numbers of individuals are involved. Like civilized society, markets need rules too. When properly formulated and enforced, regulations ensure that everyone has a level playing field.
Regulations can be good or bad, or neither, or both simultaneously. It all depends on how well the regulations achieve their goals...and whether you agree with them.
Remember the slashdot story on African ISPs having to foot the connection bill? The fundamental problem is that peripheral networks foot the bill to connect to larger networks, which foot the bill to connect to themselves (via backbones) and which connect to yet larger networks.
So why should governments regulate this? What kind of abuse is going on? If the edge players did not buy the connection, they would die.
Large players (e.g. AOL and MCI) are the ones vulnerable to bankruptcy for spending too heavily on infrastructure, that is quickly out of date.
Mac Refugee, paper MCSE, linux wanna be
Does this mean that ISP's with a huge number of Geek users will try null-routing slashdot and sites like it to prevent having to pay the cost when someone elses site gets slashdotted?
...National ISP pays YOU!
BGP already provides some of these benefits for smaller ISPs by allowing peering relationships. Let's say there is a parent ISP A, with smaller ISPs B and C in a transit relationship to A (in other words, they pay A). If B wants to send to C, it normally has to go through A, and both B and C end up paying for it. If there is significant traffic between B and C, they may decide to set up a peering relationship, sending packets directly between one another and bypassing A. Many peering relationships are set up such that B and C don't pay each other anything, since they both end up saving money by bypassing A.
Also, if you think about it, if A charges B for anything going from B to A and B charges A for anything going from A to B, you end up cancelling much of the money they make from one another. Granted, the larger ISP will most likely come out ahead, but it still needs to pay its bills. So it raise prices anyway in order to recoup the money that was cancelled out. In effect, the amount that the larger ISP charges will be unchanged, but there is extra work involved in keeping track of all this information. To make an analogy, does it make sense for you to charge your ISP for packets that go one way and not the other? No, you're paying them for the connection that they provide.
Finally, how do we determine in what situations do charges apply? If an e-mail goes from A to B, it seems logical that A should pay. But if B makes a request for a web page and the web page is transferred from A to B, should A still pay? If we make different payment rules for different protocols, this will become a mess.
In summary, I don't see how this regulation will effect anything except to make everyones lives harder.
Complicating things is the fact that probably the biggest content host in Australia (no names, no pack drill) steadfastly refuses to peer. Of course, they're owned by $tier_1_ISP. If they peer, they give away the traffic. If they don't peer, they charge money for the traffic. What do you think they're going to do?
Kids, when I got on the internet here in Denmark, there was no world wide web. You paid for an expensive account on a unix box you could dial into. You could then access Gopher, Veronica, etc. Not that it made it less interesting, because the noise-floor on the "sigal" was very low
Anyway, there were only one place to get connected in the beginning, then came providers and the problem that our local(inside the country) traffic, got routed half across Europe only to end up on the other side of the street. Then in 1994 came the DIX, Danish Internet eXchange point. Horray. So all a provider has to do, is to get a connection to the DIX and they can make peering agreements with other providers to route to each other networks via the DIX.
Now if you visit their site, you can see the prices clearly stated on the page(divide by 7 to get $(damn is going down)).
I(of course) can't see how the entire network in Australia is built, but I'd say a Exchange point would be good. I can't imagine forcing someone to pay for traffic the way the article mentions here, can be good.
But if you set up a exchange point in a major city where everybody is represented, and the cost to get connected to it, is the cable and a small fee to keep it running. Even smaller ISP's can join.
But then again I can't get the complete picture by just reading one article.
my sig
Oh well
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
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.
Just ask anyone with a deregulated, privatised electricity supply. Adelaide Australia (electricity up by more than 30% for Christmas), and California.
And I don't think deregulating our airlines (Australia) helped either. They're either about to drop out the sky like they do in the USA or we're only going to have Qantas and only football teams are going to be able to afford to fly, because the airline sponsors the competition. The internet tickets may be cheaper but the I have to fly now/tomorrow tickets, which used to be the cheapest are now more expensive than ever before.
And banking, how that has gone to shit in Australia. The banks are making huge profits, laying off lots of staff and slugging the hell out of their customers with less than multimillion turnovers. The only way to get your money out of them is to become a director or exec and then quit. Sigh. Even the shareholders are getting a raw deal out of this highway robbery.
Bring back regulation, I say!
My understanding with Australian internet traffic is that there are already different rates/costs and limits for upload traffic than for download traffic, especially if you have a "permanent" connection. (anyone else get dropouts on their adsl?)
Also when I was in NZ they had a different rate for traffic downloaded from outside the country ie USA or Australia to traffic racked up within the country.
I think some web site hosting cost more if lots of people download (upload from your server)your site too. That's why you see some sites with pleading messages not to directly link to their url, ie they'd prefer you copied their picture to your site and let your website incur the cost of people sucking onto their computers.
actually I'm having a hard time thinking of anything where regulation has made the cost go up, as much as deregulation or privatisation has. Even our bus tickets are more expensive. And don't get me started on the UK Rail system. Yikes.
cost of living up, take home pay down.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
As to pork barrelling, that still occurs, but pork is aimed differently to that in the US. Our arliamentary system, particularly when you throw in proportional representation in the Senate and IRV in the lower house, are quite different to the US's presidential system, and trying to explain the different dynamics to people who've never had exposure to it is kind of complex.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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