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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: concern over public peering points [WAS: Peering point speedpublicly available?]
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote: > This is simply untrue. > > Whilst it is possible to establish an exchange with minimal cost if it is > successful your costs will soon escalate. > > To provide carrier class service for the worlds top carriers you need to invest > in the latest hardware, you need to house multiple switches and odfs in suites, > you need to pay a team of engineers to run the exchange 24x7, you need to > maintain vendor support agreements. IXes are not for "top carriers", they're for the small and middle players, and in some cases for the top players to talk to smaller players. IXes is a way to cheaply exchange traffic. It's better to establish two IX switches and run them with 99.9% availability than to have a single IX switch and aim for 99.999%. > If you're exchange is in an already developed location then my observation is > that you need to have the above if you are to attract the larger networks which > in turn brings in the traffic and noc requirements that see increasing costs. If you're already an operator or colo facility owner, you already have all of that, which makes the cost of running an IX much less than if you're a separate entity who have to set up all these facilities. I work in an environment where IXes are readily available in all major metropolitan areas where we are, and they don't cost an arm and a leg and fiber is cheap and readily available, so we try to establish everywhere. This brings the impact of a single IX being down to very negligable, so we definately don't need 99.999%. Off the top of my head, I'd estimate that the cost of being present at an exchange here is around $1-5k per gig per month (including router port, fiber connection and IX exchange fee). We run these at approx 50% utilisation so the price per megabit is $5-10/megabit per month. This also adds a lot of reduced latency from our customers to our competitors customers which is very appreciated, it also cuts down on long-haul costs. If an IX costs $50-100k a year for a gig it tilts the whole equation, so I can understand if a lot of people don't like them if that's the cost of being connected. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: [email protected]
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