What's hilarious here, is that Level3 played the exact same game Verizon is playing now. Back in 2005 they dropped their peering entirely for several days with Cogent due to "Unbalanced Traffic Ratios" as cogent was sending L3 more traffic than L3 was sending them.
It's always historically been the case that settlement free peering required balanced traffic ratios. The difference is L3 used to have far more consumer networks buying transit from them. Before, level3 was needed to connect a bunch of different regional ISPs together who each purchased IP transit. Now, every consumer ISP of any size can orderup a nationwide backbone network (from level3 ironically, yes despite being in a peering war for ip transit, comcast's nationwide fiber network is leased from level3.)
Many of the old Ma Bells that were broken up used to be clients of level3. Through the mergers, many of them now own Tier 1 backbone networks. Verizon, ATT, and CenturyLink all are now also competing backbone providers with Level3 as well as being consumer ISPs. This leaves Level3 in the position Cogent was in when L3 depeered them.
Level3 will now gladly split the costs for unbalanced traffic ratios now that it benefits them. 10 years ago they would have tried to extract transit/paid peering from the same situation from someone else.
Perhaps the whole balanced traffic ratios requirement doesn't work in a time when every consumer ISP has their own nationwide fiber network and many also own Tier 1 IP networks. Or perhaps expect Level3 to start looking to get bought/merge by Time Warner cable or Cox to even the playing field.
It's always historically been the case that settlement free peering required balanced traffic ratios. The difference is L3 used to have far more consumer networks buying transit from them. Before, level3 was needed to connect a bunch of different regional ISPs together who each purchased IP transit. Now, every consumer ISP of any size can orderup a nationwide backbone network (from level3 ironically, yes despite being in a peering war for ip transit, comcast's nationwide fiber network is leased from level3.)
Many of the old Ma Bells that were broken up used to be clients of level3. Through the mergers, many of them now own Tier 1 backbone networks. Verizon, ATT, and CenturyLink all are now also competing backbone providers with Level3 as well as being consumer ISPs. This leaves Level3 in the position Cogent was in when L3 depeered them.
Level3 will now gladly split the costs for unbalanced traffic ratios now that it benefits them. 10 years ago they would have tried to extract transit/paid peering from the same situation from someone else.
Perhaps the whole balanced traffic ratios requirement doesn't work in a time when every consumer ISP has their own nationwide fiber network and many also own Tier 1 IP networks. Or perhaps expect Level3 to start looking to get bought/merge by Time Warner cable or Cox to even the playing field.