Henning Schulzrinne - Practical economics of networks

Beyond backbone peering, there are a number of important economic issues that deserve investigation. I will summarize a number of topics and point to some related work, but mainly want to highlight some of the economic issues that public policy faces. Issues include:

• Should content and service providers pay access networks for access?
• How do content and service providers relate to CDNs, transit providers and access providers?
• What are some of the pitfalls when talking about QoS in the context of network economics?
• What real-world economic data sources are available to analyze network performance and pricing and what are some of their limitations?
• How is interconnection handled in the non-IP world, e.g., for interconnecting voice (PSTN) networks?
• What are some of the economics of building access networks?