Subject: Re: Need to find a tunnel peer

From: [email-masked] (Tim Dorcey)
Date: Sun, 12 May 1996 00:23:31 -0400

At 9:12 AM 5/10/96, [email-masked] wrote:
>        Note that the farther away (more hops) from a tunnel provider,
>        you increase (very dramatically) the consumed bandwidth across
>        the intervening providers infrastructure. And they can't really
>        stop you from building a tunnel either.
>
>        So it is the providers best interests to build a multicast capable
>        infrastructure or have lots of extra, unused bandwidth laying about.

Except that there is a fairly clear financial model for unicast traffic:
you pay for the size of your pipe (in both directions).  Multicast
complicates that picture.  E.g., if I have sold you a T1, I might object to
delivering more than a T1's worth of your data across my net.  It all
depends on whether the ISP views itself as primarily serving data
recipients or data sources.  Since multicast allows an ISP to deliver more
data to more recipients for less load on their net, it's a win if they get
income from those recipients.  But, if some of the recipients are other
network operators, they might have to *pay* more to hand off more data (I
have no idea how ISP's manage their interconnects).  Are they generally
eager to deliver more data than they receive?  When you pay for an Internet
connection are you paying more for the privilege to send or to receive?
Which is more valuable, a TV set or a TV station?  Perhaps a lot of the
Internet character has been defined by the equal contribution of sender and
receiver to data flow?

Tim Dorcey
BoxTop Interactive