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Re: AW: ams-ix - worth using?

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Fri Aug 25 08:35:08 2006


On Aug 25, 2006, at 8:10 AM, Gunther Stammwitz wrote:


Without getting in the middle of the eternal contest over who
is better, LINX or AMS-IX (each has its own advantages and
disadvantages), the AMS-IX website says 165Gbps, the LINX
website says 95Gbps (actual publicly switched traffic), and
the DECIX website says 71Gbps. Some portion of the AMS-IX
traffic seems to be Dutch-specific content that stays in the
country, but there is plenty of global traffic there too.

I've just been in touch with a colleague of mine and he has to add the
following:
"Hey a biased analysis,
IIRC AMS-IX allows all kind of traffic including upstream, not only peering
traffic. DE-CIX is peering only. I assume the CIXes in US behave similar.
Besides that, I wonder what kind of hardware will they be using in the
future, assuming they grow like all other CIXes...."

There is no "fair" stat, since you cannot quantify an IX into a single dimension.


Equinix Ashburn almost certainly carries more traffic through the building than AMS-IX carries, probably by many times, but that stat is not published as most of the traffic is over PI.

The AMS-IX member list includes people hooking up for VoIP peering and other things at Kbps instead of Mbps or Gbps.

There is a building in Seoul, South Korea, which some claim passes multiple terabits per second over private peering. (Honestly, I don't believe that number, but it's been claimed.)

Etc., etc.

The numbers mean what the numbers mean. AMS-IX has more traffic flowing over their public switch infrastructure than any other public exchange in the world. This means only and exactly that AMS-IX has more traffic flowing over their public switch infrastructure than any other public exchange in the world - nothing more, nothing less.

If you base your buying / peering requirements on one dimension of an n-dimensional decision matrix, you are probably not choosing optimally.


All that said, AMS-IX is an outstanding IX. A network with significant European traffic is almost certain to find peering at AMS-IX beneficial. But the same is true for other exchanges (e.g. LINX).


--
TTFN,
patrick