>Perhaps it is because peering is not an entitled right. If it was, who would pay for all the costs of network growth?

My complaint here is that comcast charges as much for peering as for transport (with full routes) - I mean, if that's the case, why advertise paid peering services? Every time I've bought full routes I've had the option of asking the provider to only send me customer routes, or to filter on my end for customer routes. Hell, most people will give me a feed with customer routes, and another with full routes, so I could use them as a de-prioritized transport provider of last resort as well as gaining all the benefits of being a peer if I bought transport from them, so yeah, advertising paid peering at transport prices is just silly.

My second complaint is that they aren't on any peering exchanges. Peering exchanges are important because individual interconnects in a datacenter are expensive; the data center charges you a hefty monthly fee for every connection you have to other people at the same datacenter (like half what you'd pay for a shitty but local room in a shared house) /and/ then if you use direct interconnects both parties need to maintain a switch port.

With a peering exchange? you maintain one switchport for all your traffic that goes over the exchange. There are even route servers you can subscribe to if you want to automatically peer with everyone else on the route server at that exchange, making peering a nearly zero work, zero cost thing.

(Of course, if you are sending a /lot/ of traffic, then a individual link probably makes more sense, sure, but I'm not sending a lot of traffic.)

>If HE.net had to pay as much as their peers for the network costs, the prices would be similar.

But they are similar. after negotiation, he.net is more expensive than Cogent. to the tune that commits on he cost the same as overages on Cogent.

HE.net, for me, is actually pretty competitive with Cogent, who I think is their closest competitor, quality-wise. After negotiation, Cogent was slightly cheaper. (The interesting thing about he.net was that they started with a number that was fairly reasonable and stuck with it. It was clear that I didn't have to spend three months dicking around to get the real price, which I appreciate.) Cogent started off asking about as much as I'd expect to pay for L3 after negotiating well, but came down hard.

>You get what you pay for....

If you believe that... well, I've got some Premium VPS here for you. just $100/month per gigabyte ram. They are "premium" - way better than the regular stuff. I'll even wear a suit while I provision you.

People are always willing to charge you more for a shitty product. Always. Professionals spend huge amounts of effort getting you to pay more for the shitty product. (More for the good product, too.)

Hell, in the bandwidth world? It's completely normal to end up paying 1/5th the asking price after negotiation. Yeah, 20% of what the salesperson initially quoted is about what I normally end up paying for transit.

Do you think service is different for people who pay the asking price vs. people who negotiate down to the real price?

I mean, sure, buying transport from L3 is going to get you better connectivity than buying you transport from Cogent, and L3 is generally going to cost you more than Cogent. How much more? with my negotiation skills, about 10x more, but I only got L3 down half from their asking price, and I got Cogent down to 1/5th their asking price; I spent considerably more time on Cogent because I thought that was, well, more realistic, and at the time, Linode, the people I see as my competitors to beat, were mostly he.net, which, quality-wise, is on par with Cogent (I think he.net may be a bit better, and there is some argument if cogent or he.net is slightly better, but I think most people would agree that they are both near the bottom of the pile.)

So yeah. uh, I guess there is some relationship between "real price" and quality... but it is not nearly as close a relationship as people say.