said by mdurkin :

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It's not that simple. There are legitimate reasons why a provider receiving more traffic on an interconnection like AOL apparently is would want settlements. With the typical hot-potato routing, Cogent would be pushing their outbound traffic destined for AOL out the nearest peering connection, and AOL would be hauling that traffic across the country in many cases. It's difficult to exchange enough detail with BGP so that Cogent could know where AOL's destination customer is located to move the traffic closer; if they get it wrong then they can wind up moving traffic from Cogent in San Francisco to Chicago only for it to be delivered to an AOL customer in San Francisco. Hot potato gives the packets to the ISP best positioned to know where their own customer is as soon as possible and route it most efficiently, but it means the receiving ISP tends to move the packets farther. This is the same reason why many large ISPs will not peer with other ISPs unless they meet them at at least 3-5 peering points in several diverse geographic locations around the country.

The other major factor is the simple fact that ISPs can get more money from web hosting customers than they can from access customers--in this situation, AOL is the access provider and Cogent is the hoster. Not withstanding the fact that Cogent is flat-rate (and don't forget that Cogent's own customer contracts have requirements that customers maintain no worse than certain ratios of outbound:inbound traffic), AOL and most other ISPs likely get more revenue per Mbps from hosting customers than from access customers.

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said by JakCrow :

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said by bistro777 :

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So, on the face of it, this looks like a simple business decision regarding an unequal partnership. If you and I carpool, and I do it 3x as often as you and pay 3x the gas and tolls, wouldn’t anyone else call that an unequal arrangement? Cogent needs to join the real world of peering plus build-out its network a bit instead of crying about this. (And AOL is not the only company to have called-off peering arrangements with them – look at Sprint/PSINet/Netrail.)

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The idea of -paying- another party to peer with them is ridiculous. For your information, Cogent IS in the real world of peering. It's companies like AOL who think its shit don't stink when it tries to charge peers for the supposed "privilege" of passing traffic between networks, when it's really free bandwidth.

BTW: Peering does not shovel off a company's traffic to someone else. It means that traffic between networks is the smallest possible route and doesn't use transit provider bandwidth, like if someone on Cogent's network wants to look up a website that's on AOL's network, the traffic goes straight to and back from AOL instead of going over some other route. Most honest companies peer at common points of presence with others. Peering costs NOTHING, and in fact, is a cost benefit to ALL PARTIES INVOLVED. AOL is trying to charge someone for saving them money, regardless of the "imbalance" in the peering traffic (which, again, costs them nothing).
[text was edited by author 2003-01-24 17:15:15]

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