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)