It is not particularly about peering even tough it is a similar story. BellSouth wants to have an organisation like Apple pay for providing bandwith to its customers. This in turn means that by subscribing to an ISP you are giving it the "power" to abuse this final mile control. With South Africa it is different in that access to South Africa from American resources is relatively expensive. This can be negated by moving resources closer to Africa.
It would be interesting to know what is more expensive, connecting Africa from Europe compared to connecting Africa from the USA. This could factor in where resources of the Wikimedia Foundation are located. We are according to Alexa the 19th website in the world. When we move because of schemes like this, it might be noticed.
Thanks, GerardM
On 1/18/06, Andy Rabagliati andyr@wizzy.com wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Chris Jenkinson wrote:
I propose that if BellSouth go ahead with this stupid idea of theirs, we block access to all people connecting from BellSouth and tell them to switch their ISP. They will learn fast enough that their idea is stupid.
BellSouth provide the customers.
They think they can charge the Content Providers.
This is a very old debate, about Peering. All the major ISPs are familiar with it. The bigger Dogs get to charge the smaller Dogs.
I live in South Africa - we (as a country) pay to peer - we are a smaller Dog. America never pays to peer. Europe used to - I am not sure they do any more.
BellSouth think they are a Big Dog.
Cheers, Andy! _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l