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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 speed publicly available?]
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 2004-07-03, at 18.10, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: > It's when the exchange is being run by a separate entity that needs a > marketing department, a well-paid staff of managers, technicians etc > that > price really goes up. All this to basically manage a simple ethernet > switch that needs some patching a couple of times a month at maximum. For quite some months I have spent time thinking on this particular issue. And one thing have struck me with the discussions of staffing levels. It is always true that if your day job get's payed by some other revenue generating business, running a IX with that staff should be easy. That is cross-subsidation and there is no need for recovering costs for the IXP. At the same time, there are a number of roles you can only take that far in that way. One of the most obvious ones is growing the membership number. Now, it's not always the case that an increased membership number benefits the members, but I am willing to claim that it is in most cases. Reason is simply that the cost of running the exchange is not directly proportional to the number of members. So more members means less cost per member for a non-for-profit IX. Also, more members should increase the value for the other members as they have the possibility to "peer-away" more traffic. Now, I am willing to claim that you can only get new members "by reputation" up to a certain point. After that you will need to start to actively go out and find them, and deal with them. This will cost you money. I have with great interest followed how non-for-profit IXPs in Europe have started employing "marketing" staff. I have no idea if this pays off for them, but I suspect it does. - - kurtis - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQOpDiaarNKXTPFCVEQJDGwCfXqZw3+7YFuDPNiuvUONfVYi+mYkAnj6h Ud8VxItMH8qNXqrObTY6inSK =pr29 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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