5/98 tele.com. [Info on VPNs and BPP alliance]
Excerpt: "BPP's founders say their ultimate goal is to deliver uniform QoS across different ISPs. "This is really about whether ISPs can compete with the regional carriers for VPNs and IP telephony," says Mike Gaddis, executive vice president of Savvis. "If we don't take this step to build a quality system, we can't win that competition."
teledotcom.com
Peer Pressure Builds on the Internet
Without uniform exchange methods, smaller
ISPs may not be able to meet demand for
OSS electronic flow-through
By Peter Lambert, Senior Writer
Quid pro quo became more like quid pro no over the past
year, most big national Internet backbone providers decided
to supplant much of their free traffic peering arrangements with
other Internet providers in favor of either private peering
limited to ISPs of their own size or paid transit from lesser
players seeking a path through one national backbone to
others.
The move to private peering has been sudden and swift:
According to executives at three national ISPs, more Internet
traffic is now being exchanged via private peering than via
public peering--a first for the formerly egalitarian 'Net.
Although the big ISPs assert that the shift has raised the quality
of ISP-to-ISP network performance, most agree that peering
requirements remain nonuniform, leaving large and small
providers at odds and Internet quality of service (QoS) still
more of a crapshoot than a sure thing.
Unless that changes, ISPs are going to have trouble cashing in
on growing corporate appetites for virtual private network
(VPN) services, observers say. "If you can't do VPNs, you're
a nonplayer in the Internet," says Tom Nolle, president of the
CIMI Corp. consultancy (Voorhees, N.J.).
The challenge now is to strike a better balance between the
quality of private peering and the openness of public peering.
National backbone provider PSINet Inc. (Herndon, Va.) is
now offering what it calls free peering to its network to smaller
providers. PSINet's aim is to counteract "the potential of other
national ISPs to quietly slow down the traffic of other ISPs
until it drives them out of business," says William Schrader,
PSINet's chairman and CEO. Still, while any small ISP can
access PSINet's backbone for free, that would only cover
what Schrader estimates is one-tenth of the 'Net's users and
content providers. For a small ISP to use PSINet's private
and public exchanges to peer upward to reach major
backbones, they have to pay a hefty transit fee ($2,500 a
month for a T1 line) to PSINet.
As another option, four national service providers have founded the Brokered Private Peering (BPP) alliance. The
four--Exodus Communications Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.),
Savvis Communications Corp. (St. Louis), Electric Lightwave Inc. (Vancouver, Wash.), and The Williams Companies
(Tulsa, Okla.)--propose setting up a nonprofit organization
that would define true peers. The definition would be based on
scope (national, regional, or local) and traffic type (access,
dial-up, or Web hosting).
Equal treatment
To qualify at each level, a true peer must offer a certain
amount of capacity in a minimum number of markets and serve
a minimum number of customers. Based on those definitions,
national peers would peer for free with other national peers,
regionals with regionals, and locals with locals. As with
PSINet's deal, peering up a level in the BPP hierarchy would
require ISPs to pay a fee. That fee would be close to cost,
according to Rob Bowman, director of backbone engineering
at Exodus.
BPP would enforce exchange policies among members. For
example, if any two peers were to exceed assigned bandwidth
and threaten to saturate an exchange local loop shared with
other providers, those two peers would have to foot the bill to
expand their own exchange facilities. Under the plan, various
BPP members would manage backbones and up to 12
regional exchange points for all members.
BPP's founders say their ultimate goal is to deliver uniform QoS across different ISPs. "This is really about whether ISPs can compete with the regional carriers for VPNs and IP telephony," says Mike Gaddis, executive vice president of Savvis. "If we don't take this step to build a quality system, we can't win that competition."
More than two dozen national, regional, and local ISPs have
expressed interest in BPP, says Matthew Bross, chief
technology officer for Williams. The original founders were
seeking to close charter membership by April 24, then to
schedule the first, formal organizational meeting for mid-May.
All use of this service is subject to the Terms and Conditions of Use.
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright c 1998 tele.com, The McGraw-Hill
Companies, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
Website designed by COMPUGRAPHIA
Home page designed by Dennis Ahlgrim.
Last Modified: 5-May-98 |
