http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering has a list of historic peering disputes, but doesn't really seem to have a good pointe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering has a list of historic peering disputes, but doesn't really seem to have a good pointer to the details of the Exodus dispute. Typically, national backbones use hot potato routing when peering in lots of different cities. If you, in Northern California, on Hurricane Electric, have a video chat with someone in New York City, let's say on Verizon, and it turns out to really be peer to peer, what typically happens is that the computer in New York City will send the packets through Verizon in New York City, to Hurricane Electric in New York City, and then Hurrican Electric carries the packets to you in California. In the reverse direction, Verizon gets to carry the packets across the country. A key point here is that the two providers are equally responsible for the hassle of carrying packets across the country. This is why providers sometimes care about balanced traffic ratios. Exodus was mostly pushing traffic out, not recieving very much traffic, and so with hot potato routing, they were doing a lot less than what many would argue was their fair share in covering costs of hauling packets across the country, which seems to have been the basis for that dispute. When traffic ratios are balanced, hot potato routing has the advantage that one network doesn't need to know the details of where another network's individual IP blocks are geographically, thus reducing the amount of information big networks have to exchange and keep track of. If Comcast were to peer with you near your location, they'd have to eat the costs of hauling the traffic across the country. http://he.net/peering.html http://he.net/peering.html is Hurricane Electric's peering policy, and basically, anyone who's comfortable with settlement free peering is likely already going to have a good connection to Hurricane Electric, and my impression has been that Hurricane Electric's backbone is pretty sufficient for whatever long haul traffic it has to carry. (And for all that Hurricane Electric claims ``Hurricane Electric expects you to peer at all exchange fabrics we have in common if we peer with you via public exchanges or all facilities we have in common if we peer via private interconnect with you. In other words, if you are peering in the US, Asia and Europe at the same locations as Hurricane you must peer with Hurricane at all those locations. This is prevent problems for your and our US and European customers so that customer traffic does not cross the Pacific or Atlantic twice to return back to the same continent.'', if a lot of their customers are data centers full of web servers, it's possible that hot potato routing might get them out of a certain amount of ``their fair share'' of long haul transit.) Have you concluded that both Hurricane Electric and Cogent have trouble reaching those Comcast customers, and have you discussed the issue with Hurricane Electric and Cogent? It seems like they'd have better economies of scale in upgrading connectivity to Comcast than you would have going directly.