Negotiating Premium Peering Prices

Abstract

We have developed a novel methodology for deriving bandwidth prices for premium direct peering between Access ISPs (A-ISPs) and Content and Service Providers (CSPs) that want to deliver content and services in premium quality. Our methodology establishes a direct link between service profitability, for example, from advertising, user and subscriber loyalty, interconnection costs, and finally bandwidth price for peering. Unlike existing work in both the networking and economics literature, our resulting computational model, built around Nash bargaining, can be used for deriving quantitative results comparable to actual market prices. We analyze the U.S. market and derive prices for video, that compare favorably with existing prices for transit and paid peering. We also observe that the fair prices returned by the model for high-profit/low-volume services such as search, are orders of magnitude higher than current bandwidth prices. This implies that resolving existing (fierce) interconnection tussles may require per service, instead of wholesale, peering between A-ISPs and CSPs. Our model can be used for deriving initial benchmark prices for such negotiations.