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Level 3 made public details about its peering...

Level 3 made public details about its peering arrangements. The transit provider has tens of thousands of customers but only 51 peers interconnected in 45 cities, Mark Taylor, vice president-content and media, said in a Monday blog post (http://bit.ly/Rp4os6). Of…

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those, he said, 48 are “settlement free” -- no money changes hands. “Our policy is to refuse to pay arbitrary charges to add interconnection capacity,” he said. As for shared costs for the networks to interconnect, each party typically pays to augment its own network to allow more traffic exchange, he said. Most peers aren’t anywhere near capacity, but six peers have congestion on “almost all of the interconnect ports between us,” Taylor said. That congestion is “permanent,” he said, “where our peer refuses to augment capacity.” They're deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers, he said. They're not allowing us” to fulfill “the requests their customers make for content,” he said. Five of those congested peers are in the U.S., and all of them are large broadband consumer networks with dominant or exclusive market share in their local markets, he said: “Shouldn’t a broadband consumer network with near monopoly control over their customers be expected, if not obligated, to deliver a better experience than this?"