[ppml] 2005-1 status

[Tom Vest]

On Jan 23, 2006, at 7:21 PM, Randy Bush wrote:

>> ASes have now been implicitly adopted as a pricing factor for
>> interconnection
>
> perhaps you could expand/explain
>
> randy

Commercial service providers profit from increasing revenue or  
decreasing opex, all things remaining equal. A smart operator will  
carefully weigh the costs of any SFP requirement against the  
projected long-term benefits. The value of global SFP may be  
incalculable, but it probably looks pretty good to operators that  
generate (or could profitably generate) a lot of traffic internally.  
In any case, SFP policies that measure the benefits of  
interconnection in terms of infrastructure scope and scale encourage  
operators to consider how quickly additional capex along those lines  
might be repaid in recurring opex/transit savings. No doubt most  
investments made on this basis made sense locally at the time.  
Equally likely the vast majority had no adverse impact, or at least  
none beyond the confines of the operator/investor's (and their  
employees') own bottom line. But there are always ways to game any  
system, and some would rightly be considered harmful.

Presumably, SFP policies that measure the benefits of interconnection  
in terms of ASNs would encourage operators to compete more  
aggressively for transit customers. But zero sum competition is ugly  
and expensive, and there are probably easier ways to add new AS- 
mediated transit relationships. Most large operators administer  
multiple ASNs; who's to say that they don't need more? Most have many  
direct network service customers; who's to say that those customers  
might not be better served by having their own ASNs?

I am not suggesting any malign intent here, but this is a tough  
market. *IF* (alt: whenever/wherever) the benefits of having more ASN- 
based transit relationships exceed the costs, the technical merits of  
such ASN requirements may come to seem a lot more compelling to the  
relevant parties.

That said, if Geoff is correct and ASN proliferation has no  
relationship to routing table bloat, then maybe it doesn't matter in  
this context.

TV
(stock apology for pedantic tone applies)