North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Links between cabinets at commercial datacentre
On 17 Apr 2002, Paul Vixie wrote: > someone like exodus or qwest or at&t or uunet or abovenet would be very > likely to prevent their customers from directly cross-connecting. > mae-west (55 s market) won't allow it either. paix, equinix, switch and > data, and other "neutral colos" won't allow it to occur without a fee > but the fees are reasonable (unlike, say, the cross connect fees at > mae-west.) UUNet's never put up any roadblocks for me in crossconnecting between cabinets in their datacenters (2 cabinets belonging to different UUNet customers). They've done it quickly too -- here's the response from a UUNet engineer from the last time I asked: > > If this is NOT an Out-of-Band cross connect (POTS, ISDN, whatever) > > contacting your sales person will not be necessary. Are you simply > > attempting to join cabinets [X] and [Y] via a Cat5 connection??? If > > this is the case let me know what ports in the patch panels you want > > the cross connect terminated to and I can send the request to have > > this done today. Their quote for bringing in outside bandwidth (having a circuit punched down at the datacenter + crossconnected to a cabinet) was relatively little too -- something to the tune of $50/month iirc. At my request, they even allowed me to have a circuit run directly through their datacenter bypassing their equipment altogether. I flipped the bill for the UUNet-contracted outside vendor to do the cabling. >From what I've heard, Exodus is a bit more hell-bent on forcing customers to use Exodus (err cw) bandwidth, but even they obviously make exceptions for their larger customers (and perhaps those that threaten to walk?). > there's no answer to the question, as posed. "can you be more specific?" > I think the poster was inquiring as to common practice. ISPs will do whatever they can to make a buck. In some cases this could be forcing customers to use their own bandwidth by preventing crossconnecting within their datacenter. In other cases, it could be realizing that some customers require/value/will pay for such services. In cases where there is little or no competition, it certainly seems like the former would be more profitable (however disappointing). Regards, Adam
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