
The economics of the Internet backbone (2004) [pdf] - vmarsy
https://ideas.repec.org/p/net/wpaper/0423.html
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walrus01
Anything written about this in 2004 is going to be woefully out of date, with
huge growth in traffic from CDNs and things like Netflix, YouTube and major
companies like google establishing pops near large IXes to peer.

Mid sized ASN here, traffic patterns and ratio of paid transit to peering is
very different these days. Also transport and transit costs are dramatically
different.

Don't rely on anything this PDF says to get an idea of how ISPs handle
peering, transit and layer 2 exchanges in 2016/2017.

This article is so old it talks about MAEs... Jeez.

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alex_hitchins
Agreed. If there was an up-to-date version of this document I'd be really
interested in reading it. I am continuously fascinated with the infrastructure
etc. of the internet.

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walrus01
To a certain extent the people who have a really firm grasp on the layer 1
through 3 topologies of the Internet, as it relates to business, contractual,
transit, peering, IX, CDN, L2 inter-city transport relationships between ISPs
don't want to write a comprehensive guide to this...

If you have a mid sized ISP and the persons who make the final
contractual/purchasing decisions on transport circuits, colo space, router
equipment purchases have comprehensive knowldge of this, and detailed
knowledge/GIS data for the OSI layer 1 network topology of the geographical
area in which they operate, it provides a huge competitive advantage over
other competing ISPs in the same area.

If you look at CAIDA's ASRank tool, some of those top-100 ranked ASNs in North
America leveraged their senior neteng and management's knowledge to make
shrewd business decisions regarding how/where to build their network.
Conversely the less successful ISPs waste capex and network engineering time
and resources extending their network in ways that don't have the same ROI.

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jnbiche
> The Economics of the Internet Backbone

> [by] Nicholas Economides

What a singularly great name for an economist.

~~~
grkvlt
Nominative determinism in action? See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism)
;)

