Internet Scaling: Another view, although this time a bit self-serving, albeit instructive, from InterNAP.
From America's Network Magazine:
"Peering into the Future"
Next-gen routers, switches, servers and set-top boxes aren’t going to help end users download MP3s any faster when the Internet’s peering points bog down. InterNAP says it’s time to bypass ’Net peering in favor of centrally managed network access points; actually, it’s already built over 20 of them with the help of the world’s biggest backbone providers. Is this the future of peering?
By John C. Tanner
An excerpt:
Poor scaling
The reason why peering points pose such a problem, says McBride, has a lot to do with the Internet’s decentralized, freestyle model.
“Every time a new person logs on the public Internet, that introduces a new unknown variable in traffic performance. You don’t know what kind of things they’re going to download, or when, or where packets will go,” he says.
McBride also points out that peering has historically been a free model with no settlement payments, as opposed to the bilateral accounting rate system used by international carriers for circuit-switched voice services.
“As capitalism has entered the picture, these big backbone providers like Cable & Wireless and Sprint can keep their net costs down by pushing their traffic onto someone else’s network as fast as possible. The problem is that this does not scale well,” McBride says, who adds that this is true whether your backbone runs in the megabit, gigabit or terabit realms. “Even if your backbone scales, the peering points don’t,” he says.
The complete article at:
americasnetwork.com |
