Tuesday, December 4. 2007Colder Winds?John Linton I don't know what to make of this email sent to Steve from iiNet yesterday evening: "Would you be the right person at Exetel to speak to regarding peering traffic? For some time now, iiNet has made its Akamai farm available to Pipe peers at no cost (others have closed farms). The model was based on that fact that our user base generally required the content anyway and the incremental cost of allowing other ISPs to access this service was minimal (ie most of the time it was cached content) However, Exetel has become a significant user of this service (15%) and we are finding that the hit rate on the cache is diminishing to the point where I am wearing an international transit cost to support Exetel traffic. Compounding this is a need to re-scale the service to manage the increased volumes (extra HW etc - $$) We are looking at a number of models and I am sure you will have a few ideas as well (host your own, take from another local or international farm, pay for the service etc). Our plan is to resolve the matter by Xmas (before it becomes a QoS issue for iiNet customers) and this may involve removing the ability for you to access our farm. Conscious that some of our actions may cause an impact to your customers and happy to chat about ways to minimise this Regards Greg Bader CTO" I appreciated the courteous (courtesy from a 'competitor' is not something seen very often in this industry - in fact if such is the case here it would be the first time I've ever seen it) advanced notice of a possible disruption of traffic flow to a previously available preferred destination (Akamai hosts many large software company's distros and updates and a Sydney based download source is always going to be a preferred option to any overseas download location for any end user). iiNet can and should do whatever is in their own best interests, and I'm sure they always do, so I wondered why sending this email to Exetel (a small and irrelevant competitor) was actually done. On face value a courteous advice - perhaps that's all it is - except for the last line of the email. "Conscious that some of our actions may cause an impact to your customers and happy to chat about ways to minimise this" Does iiNet want to charge Exetel for traffic downloaded from their resources? Seems to be the most likely implication - but why would a competitor who (having worked out that they were providing a cost benefit to a competitor) want to do that? It sort of goes against the whole concept of peering and why make the Akamai data available in the first place? Perhaps they want Exetel to provide a quid pro quo and give iiNet customers access to the P2P cache if it turns out that there is significant traffic available from that resource? Unlikely. I, a completely non-technical person, was also deeply puzzled by the line in the email: "and we are finding that the hit rate on the cache is diminishing to the point where I am wearing an international transit cost to support Exetel traffic". As far as I'm aware the whole point of Akamai locating disk arrays in different cities around the globe is to ELIMINATE the back haul charges by downloading a file once to a 'local' server and then allowing tens of thousands of downloads of that file at no additional back haul. I also didn't understand the reference to "cache" as, again as far as I'm aware, no 'cache' is involved - the image is either on the local drive or it isn't. So I remain puzzled and just make an assumption that iiNet has introduced some new 'accounting system' whereby it's requiring its internal 'service departments' to move from cost centres to profit centres and this is just a way for iiNet's CTO to generate external revenue - though I had thought that iiNet set up Chime to do that? We'll respond politely thanking them for their courtesy and asking them what they really have in mind - I can't work out what it means. Maybe there just is one exceptionally courteous (to competitors) CTO in the ISP industry? (40 years of a working life time say that is never going to be the most likely case) Trackbacks
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Here's what I believe is meant:
Exetel users are visiting sites that use the Akamai system to mirror/cache content locally. The system naturally chooses the iiNet mirror/cache to pull this from because it is "local" to the user. The problem appears to be that Exetel users are increasing visiting pages with content that is not mirrored/cached locally and therefore has to be downloaded by the local system from the overseas servers first. In short, it seems that there is some sort of "automated caching/mirroring" going on, and iiNet is paying more than they expected for the international traffic it generates. (Sidenote: MySpace use Akamai to serve much of there content. Interesting article about it here http://downloads.pcworld.about.com/article/id,133350-page,1/article.html ) It looks like the CTO is, politely, fishing for a little co-contribution to the traffic cost of their Akamai mirror/cache. Comment (1)
I read it much the same.
If iiNet wants to run an Akamai mirror for whatever reason suits them and if the normal and 'natural' routing that takes place causes that resource to be heavily used, then what can they expect? It sounds like it is doing exactly what it was designed to do. Asking Exetel to contribute financially may or may not be fair and reasonable. Blocking Exetel from access may also be not fair or reasonable. What would Akamai have to say about the issue? I am sure they don't want to see ISPs blocked from cached content. If Exetel receives a real financial benefit then it might be in Exetel's interest to contribute something to iiNet, how much (as in how many dollars) well -- how long is a peice of string? However, if Exetel contributes now -- should they continue to contribute regularly or should Exetel just become its own Akamai mirror and let iiNet do their own thing.... both independently. Of course if Exetel does go down the track of becoming an Akamai mirror then they might experience the same 'issues' that iiNet is now concerned about. There would seem to be quite a bit of research required to ascertain some more answers here before any solution or proposal should proceed. Kind Regards AndrewM Comment (1)
Look like an open and shut case.
He is approaching Exetel to choose a solution (one of the three mentioned) and has already decided to block the traffic from midnight 24 Dec. Looks like an [open] approach but there is a deadline [close]. Comment (1)
Clearly, I'm not as clever as you are. my, obviously muddled mind, perceives too many inconsistencies in too few words for it to be clear to me that there is a single intention in the email.
Some entity somewhere on the internet changing its routing policies happens tens of thousands of times each day - none of them advise a small company like Exetel of their changes either ahead of time or subsequently. My understanding of the concept of the internet is that it deals with the millions of planned and unplanned changes that occur each day seamlessly. Comments (4)
iiNet might just be trying to do some capacity planning going forward here.
On a face-value level, they're asking whether or not Exetel's usage should feature in their planning, and if they do what sort of positive they can put on their balance sheet to offset it. I can see John's thinking here though. It would surely be a positive if this was a sign of things to come from the bigger ISPs in Australia. Comments (3)
It would be nice to think that but....
...my current view is that iiNet had to guarantee a certain amount of download traffic to Akamai to 'win' the right to a hosting service in Sydney and to meet those traffic commitments they made the server content available to all peering connections at Pipe in Sydney. As their own users began to generate enough traffic to guarantee their commitments they have now decided to close off access to third parties little by little. If you look at the Pipe provided MRTG reports of usage in the Sydney peering centre you see that iiNet's traffic is now exceeding 1 gbps for the first time and that would indicate that they have more than enough traffic to meet their commitments. I still am of the opinion that there is no caching or backhauls involved in the Akamai service but then I haven't looked at the requirements for over a year. I must now do that. Peripherally, and unimportantly going forward, iiNet appear to be now exploring whether they can make money by selling access to the Akamai data. Comments (4)
Akamai IS essentially a caching service - after a quick Google, there's a quick overview of how it works here:
http://studies.ac.upc.edu/EPSC/FSD/Akamai-technical_faq.pdf Basically, the servers only hold recently requested data - less commonly-requested data is downloaded on an as-needs basis, and deleted if space is needed for newer content - the servers do not have anywhere near the disk space to hold all Akamai content - and the content often changes quickly anyway. So in a potential scenario (taking iiNet and Exetel as an example, but it could apply between any two ISPs) - An Exetel user requests a file from iiNet's Akamai cluster - If the Akamai cluster doesn't have it cached, it downloads it (using iiNet's external links) and then transmits (across the peering link) to the Exetel user. - If the file is a rarely-accessed file, it will eventually be deleted from the cache. End result of the above - iiNet has paid for the download, while Exetel have received it across peering. Now, the above is not a problem if Akamai only hosts commonly-used files, because many customers from many ISPs (including iiNet) can download the one file. However, there has been an increase in Akamai being used to distribute data that is requested a lot less - which leads to the scenario shown above - which I assume is what was alluded to in the email you received. Also I'm not sure about your theory of "winning" a hosting service in Sydney - from memory iiNet have had an Akamai farm in Perth for donkeys years already back from when they were a lot smaller - and I'm pretty sure you don't have to "win" the right to an Akamai cluster anyway. Comment (1)
Selling access to the Akamai data is definitely one possibility, but I think they might be after something else you've alluded to.
iiNet make a fairly big deal of their public policy of not doing anything to P2P traffic. Perhaps they're thinking of getting access to Exetel's investment in P2P caching technology without actually putting it in themselves, as a sort of trial without the expense? Comments (3)
I doubt iiNet want the legal issues that come with using a P2P cache. I doubt they want anything to do with it. So i think you guys are jumping the gun a bit on it
Also why not change Exetels DNS so it uses the Internode Akamai Farm instead tracert www.news.com.au Tracing route to a1273.g.akamai.net [150.101.98.72] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 Comments (2)
Legal issues? I can see your point, but I fully expect that Exetel have looked into the legal side of P2P caching before going ahead.
In fact, the legal issues could contribute to iiNet wanting to try the technology out this way - they're one step further removed in the extremely unlikely case that Exetel have gotten the legal determination wrong, and with much less expense commited should that even occur. If Exetel take up your suggestion of going to Internode's Akamai farm, I wonder how long until they get a similar e-mail from their CTO... Comments (3)
There are no "legal issues" any more than there are "legal issues" with accepting and routing data transit requests from any source - I think it's called the internet.
Exetel simply used a peering point which, by definition, allows the peers to send and receive data from available routes. My comment was purely one of surprise that any competitor would actually advise another competitor of actions, purely of their own right to make, they were planning to take. Subsequently we are now aware of why it was in their sensible commercial interests to provide such an advice that they did that but that wasn't known when I expressed my surprise. It is of no consequence to Exetel and the decision has been made to sign a contract with Akamai to host a set of their servers in the Sydney PoP. We were unaware up to this time just how much traffic was iiNet Akamai sourced - up to that time we had thought, in the event that we gave it any thought, that Pipe was hosting the Akamai servers in their data centre - which as I understand it they may well now do. Comments (4)
Are the Akamai Servers going to to open to PIPE Users or just Exetel Users
Comments (2)
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