ibiblio and other unis mirroring service

[fatdoguser]

ibiblio is owned by the University of North Carolina. Other unis around the world also tend to provide mirrors for the likes of Fatdog and many others systems. Why? The simple answer is that major traffic exporters are paid by ISPs to put their content into their networks. The reasons are varied, but its a simple case of how ISPs pay each other for traffic (peering). If the traffic balances, there is no cheque. But if a load of traffic goes into a ISP, and that it is out of balance to what is returned that ISP writes a cheque for the difference. So, unis, which were massive suckers of traffic into their networks needed to find a way to offset the costs and providing mirroring services is a relatively inexpensive way to do that.

[Flash]

ISPs pay to have stuff put on their networks? Where did you hear that?

[fatdoguser]

Poorly worded, you get the gist. Much of corporate works that way, where often, at least when I was occupied, the amounts were very open to negotiation, no real reliable actual measures. "We're obviously benefiting more from usage of your network/whatever than you do of ours, so how about a cheque for $1M for last year, or we'll buy/supply you with some hardware/resources". Inter-operational gentlemen agreements between Telcos ...etc. In Finance (Stock Exchanges) some are paid fractional cents for each trade order they place, so there are machines running at full speed to continually place price discovery orders - so the price of a stock in Japan will soon be aligned to the price of the same stock in London and New York. Those literally
closest to the market stand to make the most, to the extent that some have bored expensive holes that are more direct than routing via a longer/twisted route - fractional nano-seconds light speed communications competitive differences/advantage. In prior centuries some used flags to convey prices from say London to Paris, beat the rest and you had price knowledge advantage.