Chapter 3 - The Internet Transit Playbook
This chapter presents clever manipulations of commodity Internet Transit services.
As previously mentioned, these “tricks of the trade” are not “recommended” tactics. A few, you may consider unsavory or even unethical. They were gleaned from conversations with hundreds of peering coordinators, and are included here because they clarify the Internet Transit paradigm so well, and they give us an opportunity to apply the terms and definitions learned in the previous chapter.
Introduction
When I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the local newspaper ran a yearly article featuring how the locals get around town efficiently. These tricks included rarely used routes and secret ways to bypass congested paths using side streets, one-way streets, and alleys, and included even illegally using parking lots as avenues between two roads. Whether you used them or not, it was enlightening to read about these tricks.
In this chapter we will present a dozen tactics that have been used effectively to manipulate simple commodity Internet Transit services.
Edge “Tricks of the Trade”
One challenge that we pose during the peering workshops is to create your own “manipulation.”
Put yourself in the shoes of a purchaser of Internet Transit. Based upon the information you have learned so far, what clever maneuvers could you use? How would you optimize your transit purchase? How would you minimize your transit costs? You have all of the information you need to answer these questions.
Sometimes it helps to start by enumerating some assumptions.
Let’s assume that you are the purchaser of Internet Transit in a market with the following typical characteristics:
- The price declines yearly.
- The market for Internet Transit services is open and competitive.
- Pricing varies widely (say plus or minus 20 to 50%).
- 95th Percentile zero-commit services are available for $20/Mbps.
- You may be wildly successful (70Gbps) or have only 5Mbps of total traffic.
- There are tiered transit services as discussed in Chapter 2 and shown in Table 3-1.
Table 3-1. Sample Internet Transit Pricing with Commits
It is very important that, before you continue reading, you think about and write down a few strategies that reduce your monthly transit expense and/or improve its performance.
Answer: Here are the tricks of the trade collected from the field.
- Optimal Internet Transit, where you commit early to the next higher commit level
- Gaming the 95th Percentile, where you carefully orchestrate traffic across many ISPs
- Multi-Homing for performance and economic benefits
- Renegotiating Multi-Year Contracts every year
- Playing the Market to leverage information asymmetry
- Resell Transit to allow you entry into a higher commit and lower price point in a tiered market
- Secret Sauce Transit to create additional routing controls based on performance and cost
- Building into a Cheap Internet Region to leverage the wide market disparity around the globe
- Internet Transit Troughs, which can be filled with no cost
- Capturing Content and Access Customers to allow feeding from a two-sided market
- Short-term Transit, which enables the participation in the dropping transit market without commitments
- Deploying Trial Gear into Production to minimize the cost of operating a network
Peering Workshop Practice Question
Here are a few practice questions from the Internet Peering Workshop:
1. Given the assumptions in this chapter, what is the maximum cost savings realized by the successful execution of the:
A) Optimal Transit tactic
B) Gaming 95th percentile
2. What other tactics were not mentioned?
3. You are an eyeball-heavy ISP and your buddy is a content-heavy ISP. Therefore, you are not paying for traffic in your outbound direction, and your buddy is not paying for traffic in the inbound direction. How might you work together to reduce costs?
Answers to these questions are in the answer key in the back of the book.