North American Network Operators Group
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Re: concern over public peering points [WAS: Peering point speed publicly available?]

  • From: ren
  • Date: Sat Jul 03 08:35:50 2004 
At 02:07 AM 7/3/2004 -0400, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

b) The price being charged for the public exchange ports is non-trivial
   (especially compared to the cost of transit these days!), and is billed
   on a port basis instead of a usage basis (at least in the US). Since
   public peering is treated as a "necessary evil", with traffic moved to
   much more economical private peers when they start getting full, no one
   wants to provision extra capacity ahead of demand (in fact, in the US
   it is exceedingly rare to see anyone with 2 ports on a single public
   exchange).
<hi ras!> As one of the folks who gets questioned by Sales all the time about the reasons behind the multiple shared fabric ports at the IXs I'll gladly explain why we have 14 in the US at present and are preparing for ~5-10 abroad.

1. Trials. There are some networks who are not ready to properly manage private peering, they should be but they are not. A 90-day 'try before you buy' helps reduce the nickel & diming to a budget that remote hands and inventory adjustments chew. IMHO, if they do not have their operations activities in order they should not be a peer and that is one of the criteria we verify.

2. PNI sizing. Some networks really don't know how much traffic they will have to other networks when adding peering relations. If they argue about sizing it is best to drop them on to shared fabrics first to confirm with visuals what is flowing.

3. PNIs do not guarantee congestion avoidance. Unfortunately private peering does not remove congestion with some networks, it just shifts it. The peering relations community is well networked with each other. We know which network offenders have capacity issues regardless of public or private options.

4. International peers. Rarely are two network foot prints or goals for business the same. I would rather make available the unique international routes to our customers than miss that opportunity by being a public peering snob. This also allows the view towards new markets which rely heavily on shared fabrics. While not customary in the US, many EU peering IXs are multiple interconnected buildings managed by a single IX vendor at the shared fabric layer. Connecting to the shared fabric is an easy way to reach those networks in various buildings without dark fiber complexities.

5. Costs. Private peering is expensive, don't let anyone fool you. There is a resource investment in human terms that is rarely calculated properly, all the way from planning of inventory to planning for capacity augments after the physical install. It is often difficult to capture the cost to roll all those fibers that are improperly installed. This I'm sure you are painfully aware of <G>.

6. Management. Set a range of expectations on levels for monitoring, hardware, power, staff time, and capacity upgrade paths by designating some peers in a 'group' vs. monitoring all as individuals.

I encourage authors of RFPs to stop placing such an unnecessary stigma on public peering. Those networks without the benefit of options for interconnecting should be penalized for failure to evolve. Quite likely they are not connected to the growing sources in the current peering game. What is this called... the bagel syndrome? -ren