Paid Peering as an Adjunct to Settlement Free Interconnect (15 min). As a perennial topic over the last ten years or so, the topic of settlement-based peering has come up as a solution for peering partners who do not meet the Settlement Free Interconnect (SFI) requirements. This paid peering approach, however, has not been widely adopted for a variety of reasons that we would like to discuss and understand. Speaker: TBD

AS7018 & AS7132 Discussion (15 min). With the merger of two of the largest peering companies in the U.S. Peering Ecosystem there are questions in the Peering Community about the near and medium term impacts. The speaker (TBD) will share insights into the migration and schedule for integration, along with any peering changes that might ensue.

Emerging Content Provider Peering Approach (15 min). Two competing forces are driving the peering debate at content companies: 1) lower transit prices and the ability to leverage marquee brand names make it difficult for content companies to justify the business case for peering, and 2) at the same time, the next generation content (video streaming, IPTV, IP for populating caches with 40G video files, etc.) is expected to increase the value of peering by at least a factor of 10. The more traffic that a content company can peer, the greater the benefits of peering to the entire peering community. Greater control over the end-user experience is a powerful motivation for the content company but needs to be balanced with the cost and overhead of running a backbone, managing spikes and transit commits. A leading content company will share its experience, its business motivations for peering, and provide lessons learned for other content companies looking to peering to distribute their content. Speaker: TBD

Peering Contact Database (peeringdb.com) Update (10 min). This shared database provides contact info for the community, so we'll have a brief statistical update on the usage and some words to encourage continued population of community information into the DB. Speaker: TBD

The Great Peering Debate (30 min). "The Utility of MEDs" will be the title of the Great Peering Debate. "From a Practical Perspective, are MEDs useful for distributing the peering traffic load?" is the question; "MEDs are not a useful tool for Peering" will be defended by Richard Steenbergen; and "MEDs are a useful tool for Peering" will be defended by Patrick Gilmore. The Peering Contact Debate will be presented by the peeringDB Admin Team.

Other Topics. We expect that between now and February there will be a variety of emerging issues so we will use the flexibility of the BOF format to include late breaking topics of interest to the community.

About the Presenter
Bill Norton is Co-Founder and Chief Technical Liaison for Equinix. He focuses on research on large-scale interconnection and ISP peering, and in particular, scaling Internet operations using optical networking. Bill has published and presented his research in a variety of international forums. From 1987 to 1998, he served in several staff and managerial roles at Merit Network, directing national and international network research and operations activities and serving as NANOG coordinator. Bill received a B.A. in Computer Science and an M.B.A. from the Business School at the University of Michigan, and has been an active member of the Internet Engineering Task Force for the past 15 years.