North American Network Operators Group

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Re: different thinking on exchanging traffic

  • From: Adrian Chadd
  • Date: Wed Jun 03 08:42:04 1998

Sean Donelan writes:
>>> Currently about 5%-15% of my traffic gets routed over the UtahREP.
>>
>>please describe measurement technique.
>

[snip]

>Traffic elasticity is an interesting issue.  How much traffic is
>being exchanged, which wouldn't otherwise be exchanged?  In other words
>is the existance of the local exchange point actually causing more
>traffic to be generated.  This is a what if question.  If you didn't
>have the local exchange, would you still haul highly elastic traffic
>like USENET across your long-haul links?  Or is it highly elastic
>traffic like at-home students or employees who use a local ISP modem
>pool for access instead of dialing directly into the remote institution.

[snip]

>And finally, usability.  The I know it when I see it issue.  The right
>combination of adequate speed, low latency, and little congestion that
>gives the end-user a 'good' connection.  Since we still have a hard time
>defining what is 'good' this is the hardest one to measure.  I can really
>only measure this indirectly, such as the number of customer compliants or
>through surveys of non-customers.  In general, customers of ISPs connected
>to the local exchange point report better connections to resources on ISPs
>also attached to the local exchange point than to those same ISPs before
>the exchange point.

Something of interest here might be centralising services at NAPs. For example,
putting a news server at the NAP running Cylone, the NAP purchasing a news only
T1 (or whatever) to serve the box, and then participants who would like a news
feed getting it directly from this box and paying extra.

Another intersting saving is via proxy neighboring over a local NAP. Rather
significant traffic savings have been observed in local NAPs inside Australia
by participants neighboring squids. AU being a rather heavy user of caching
compared to the US.

Other ideas were tossed around including a central DNS server/cache, gaming
servers, etc.. and one peering network inside AU (Ausbone) is doing this.
(But they provider inter-NAP links, which isn't really applicable here in this
discussion).

Just out of curiousity, since I'm not in the US, how much would a T1 cost
point to point inside a city, without default IP transit? With IP transit?
T3? Anything else 'common' ? 

Adrian