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Re: ams-ix - worth using?

  • From: Niels Bakker
  • Date: Fri Aug 25 09:20:09 2006

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

AMS-IX allows the exchange of IPv4 and IPv6 traffic and doesn't mind whether you pay to receive certain prefixes. At any IXP, you can only send traffic towards peers that actually announced the netblocks to you [give or take next-hop fudging that some allow and some disallow].


* [email protected] (Patrick W. Gilmore) [Fri 25 Aug 2006, 14:34 CEST]:
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.

Excellent example on why this is not a fair comparison, as Equinix Ashburn is a building and AMS-IX is a collection of Ethernet switches. :-)

Given that the internal sequential numbering for fibers at NIKHEF (one of four housing sites with an AMS-IX switch) runs into the thousand, I'm willing to believe that the amount of traffic exchanged over private interconnects at all four locations is significant, if not way bigger than what's sent across the AMS-IX platform.


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).

Thanks, Patrick.

TIE,


-- Niels.

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