AT&T raising peering prices?

[rabbit85]

[andy68]

Have not herd about that one.

[spoon84713]

[andy68]

Peering is settlement free among equal (peer) providers, so there is no real way that AT&T can raise the "cost" of something that is and by its nature has to remain free. It could be increasing the requirements for its peers, though - but then again, it has a lot smaller US-only network than most others (e.g. Gblx, AboveNet, etc. who have much larger global networks), so it's not in a position to increase the requirements. In fact, AT&T doesn't meet peering requirements of a number of global networks, by being so small and not a real global network (who require peer interconnections on various different continents). Then again, it does have a lot of "eyeballs" type of traffic, which is definitely it's trump card.

[spoon84713]

Maybe it's the transit prices they're raising. I know my old AT&T rep didn't know the differences between public peering, private peering and transit.

[rabbit85]

Settlement free doesn't mean *always* settlement free. There's nothing that says AT&T cannot try to extort payment from its "peers". It wouldn't be the first time this has been tried.

If I remember correctly, the first peering war was between PSInet and AGIS. There have been many since then. Not too long ago was the infamous attempt by AOL (ATDN) to extract payments from Cogent by claiming heavily unbalanced ratios. I found this laughable considering ATDN is all pull - or more to the point, all bull.

[andy68]

Originally posted by Dragoon
...ATDN is all pull - or more to the point, all bull.

:laugh:

[rabbit85]

ATDN is about pay peering to AOL, isn't it?

[rabbit85]

Originally posted by Mfjp
ATDN is about pay peering to AOL, isn't it?

Yes atdn offer paid peering with aol at around $65 per mbps on 100mbps.

[rabbit85]

Originally posted by rusko
thats kind of pointless at today's pricing, isnt it =]


Well, but the providers who charge such $60-$80/Mbps amounts for pay peering (there's a few others, such as Bell Canada, for example) usually charge $120+/Mbps (double the pay peering cost) for actual transit, and usually are in a monopoly or monopoly-like position with a lot of traffic, and thus in the position to choose whom to peer (e.g. multiple OC-12s minimum, 1 Gb/s+ sustained traffic exchanged rate required) and not to.

So, sometimes indeed transit is cheaper than peering..