How many tiers? Pricing in the internet transit market

Vytautas Valancius, Cristian Lumezanu, Nick Feamster, Ramesh Johari, Vijay V. Vazirani

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

99 Scopus citations

Abstract

ISPs are increasingly selling "tiered" contracts, which offer Internet connectivity to wholesale customers in bundles, at rates based on the cost of the links that the traffic in the bundle is traversing. Although providers have already begun to implement and deploy tiered pricing contracts, little is known about how to structure them. Although contracts that sell connectivity on finer granularities improve market efficiency, they are also more costly for ISPs to implement and more difficult for customers to understand. Our goal is to analyze whether current tiered pricing practices in the wholesale transit market yield optimal profits for ISPs and whether better bundling strategies might exist. In the process, we offer two contributions: (1) we develop a novel way of mapping traffic and topology data to a demand and cost model; and (2) we fit this model on three large real-world networks: an European transit ISP, a content distribution network, and an academic research network, and run counterfactuals to evaluate the effects of different bundling strategies. Our results show that the common ISP practice of structuring tiered contracts according to the cost of carrying the traffic flows (e.g., offering a discount for traffic that is local) can be suboptimal and that dividing contracts based on both traffic demand and the cost of carrying it into only three or four tiers yields near-optimal profit for the ISP.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2011 Conference, SIGCOMM'11
Pages194-205
Number of pages12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
EventACM SIGCOMM 2011 Conference, SIGCOMM'11 - Toronto, ON, Canada
Duration: Aug 15 2011Aug 19 2011

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2011 Conference, SIGCOMM'11

Other

OtherACM SIGCOMM 2011 Conference, SIGCOMM'11
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto, ON
Period8/15/118/19/11

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

Keywords

  • Algorithms
  • Design
  • Economic

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