Free/The Iliad Group is the Comcast/Verizon of the EU...They have horrible peering and transit policies, which they maintain under the auspices of French protectionist laws.
It may have its own ASN, but its still run just like the rest of Iliad's networks. Online.net/Ponytelecom still lacks diversified transit that isn't also run horribly hot and the NOC peering policies make it so that its all but impossible to actually peer without exchanging money.
All the network properties operated under the Iliad umbrella suffer from this. Iliad and Orange pushed a bill through parliament that basically says "French ISPs can charge you whatever they want and you're required to pay it because operating in France means mandatory connections to the entrenched regional ISPs"
well being the "noc", I pretty much know about it, so, point by point :
- first our policy is here : http://as12876.net/, where do you see "paid peering" ?
- diversified transit : we've got 4 tier 1 transit, is not that enough "diversified" ? I hardly see what we could do better there ...
- peering: we are also available on the 2 main French IX ! you just need to drop a mail to get our routes on them (how much costs a mail these days ?)
we are also doing free PNI with those having enough datas to send/receive
we are also adding a new IX soon (order was sent yesterday) which will improve our peering towards Europe
the infos you have are at least 10 years old imho...
maybe look at http://map.online.net
Not really. Try to do a transfer of a single big backup file from a server with online.net and a server in Denmark. 6kB/s, yes, 6kB/s. Doing the same from a server with Gandi (VM), OVH (dedicated), was basically 100Mbps (it was what I had that time). To serve the French market only, Online.net is really good, but you do not have a consistent high quality network in Europe (I did not try outside EU).
