From: Steve Gibbard (no email)
Date: Sun Jan 21 2007 - 15:50:51 EST
On Sun, 21 Jan 2007, Joe Abley wrote:
> Remember though that the dynamics of the system need to assume that
> individual clients will be selfish, and even though it might be in the
> interests of the network as a whole to choose local peers, if you can get
> faster *throughput* (not round-trip response) from a remote peer, it's a
> necessary assumption that the peer will do so.
It seems like if there's an issue here it's that different parties have
different self-interests, and those whose interests aren't being served
aren't passing on the costs to the decision makers. The users'
performance interests are served by getting the fastest downloads
possible. The ISP's financial interests would be served by their flat
rate customers getting their data from somewhere close by. If it becomes
enough of a problem that the ISPs are motivated to deal with it, one
approach would be to get the customers' financial interests better
aligned with their own, with differentiated billing for local and long
distance traffic.
Perth, on the West Coast of Australia, claims to be the world's most
isolated "capitol" city (for some definition of capitol). Next closest is
probably Adelaide, at 1300 miles. Jakarta and Sydney are both 2,000 miles
away. Getting stuff, including data, in and out is expensive. Like
Seattle, Perth has many of its ISPs in the same downtown sky scraper, and
a very active exchange point in the building. It is much cheaper for ISPs
to hand off local traffic to each other than to hand off long distance
traffic to their far away transit providers. Like ISPs in a lot of
similar places, the ISPs in Perth charge their customers different rates
for cheap local bandwidth than for expensive long distance bandwidth.
When I was in Perth a couple of years ago, I asked my usual questions
about what effect this billing arrangement was having on user behavior.
I was told about a Perth-only file sharing network. Using the same file
sharing networks as the rest of the world was expensive, as they would end
up hauling lots of data over the expensive long distance links and users
didn't want to pay for that. Instead, they'd put together their own,
which only allowed local users and thus guaranteed that uploads and
downloads would happen at cheap local rates.
Googling for more information just now, what I found were lots of stories
about police raids, so I'm not sure if it's still operational. Legal
problems seem to be an issue for file sharing networks regardless of
geographic focus, so that's probably not relevant to this particular
point.
In the US and Western Europe, there's still enough fiber between cities
that high volumes of long distance traffic don't seem to be causing
issues, and pricing is becoming less distance sensitive. The parts of the
world with shortages of external connectivity pay to get to us, so we
don't see those costs either. If that changes, I suspect we'll see it
reflected in the pricing models and user self-interests will change. The
software that users will be using will change accordingly, as it did in
Perth.
-Steve
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