North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Info on MAE-EAST
Brett writes: > MAE-Houston, a small NAP in the scheme of things, but it makes for a good > example so we'll use it. $2000/month to get your foot in the door, then > another large chunk of cash to connect to the Gigaswitch which all things > considered, isn't really needed. Rather than waste their money on equipment > that all in all just doesn't need to be there, why not make it more economic > for local players to get involved and cross connect to eachother. In the end > you not only save money by not bringing in useless hardware but you garner > more customers by lessening the price of the private interconnect. Hmmm. According to what I learnt in school, the cost of a connected network like a GIGAswitch or Catalyst or DELNI with N participants is: (N x interface_cost) + (N x port_cost) ...while the cost of a connected network made up of wire peers is: (2 x sum(N - 1) x interface_cost) "sum(N-1)" is an interesting function. Here are some examples: % calc > define sum(n) = n > 0 ? n + sum(n-1) : 0; "sum" defined > for (n = 2; n < 20; n++) print n,2*sum(n-1); 2 2 3 6 4 12 5 20 6 30 7 42 8 56 9 72 10 90 11 110 12 132 13 156 14 182 15 210 16 240 17 272 18 306 19 342 That means with 19 ISP's in a GIGAswitch-free room, there are 342 FIP's at a cost of, what, US$12000 each after discount? I'll betcha I can buy quite a few GIGAswitches for US$4.1M. Oops, that's not a fair comparison, since with a GIGAswitch I also need 19 FIP's. Figure that a fully configured GIGAswitch retails without discount for US$80K and that 19 FIPs are going to run another US$228K. That's still a *lot* less than 2*sum(n-1). This also assumes that we all have VIP2 cards and want to burn 9 7513 slots just on local peering, and it further assumes that a 7513 won't just simply melt if all the interfaces ever get hot at the same time. The breakeven is between N=3 and N=4. On the Internet, N never stays small. (And that breakeven assumes that the 4 people have to buy the whole GIGAswitch with noone like MFS to underwrite the costs of the unused ports; that means four people in a room together could SAVE MONEY buying the GIGA- switch.) Gah. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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