North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Coop Peering Fabric??

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Tue Aug 12 10:11:23 2008
On Aug 12, 2008, at 9:58 AM, David Diaz wrote:

Love the Borg comment.

Thanx.


Great thread. Old topic. It recycles every couple of years. Not to speak
for telx or Mike L but I do not think anyone was motivated to Borg anything
but to support AIX. 10Gig ports are expensive.

I like the idea of more exchange points in that they usually provide more
recovery pts and redundancy, allow the sharing of skills and knowledge in
the local community, and provide flexibility for growth and change of the
internet. How many COs do we have? There has long been the argument of how
many IXs are needed, would it be 1 per state? What happens with Voip, IPtv
etc.

As for coops I think the argument is would the larger traffic players feel
comfortable connecting and making it a part of their networks? Who are the
anchors and 1st movers? What are the guarantees that any investment in
infrastructure needed to get there will be recovered over X years... Will
the coop fold before that pt? Wll it have the resources to upgrade.

Who said anything about larger traffic players? What's wrong with a bunch of little guys getting together to trade traffic, for fun and profit?

The smaller guys might have a better focus on performance in the local area (gamers anyone?), plus they tend to pay more per Mbps because they don't have scale, which makes moving a little traffic off more economical.

All that said, Akamai is a pretty big network and they're present at a lot of these "small" IXen. Ditto for local eyeball networks, e.g. Shaw @ SIX, Rogers @ TorIX, etc.


I so not think a poison pill is needed. Perhaps just a group or company
championing Coops and giving them booth-space at events, sponsoring
conference travels, providing rack space etc. But if it's in the BEST
interest of the members to have a larger group come in and take over then
what is the harm? What is the alternative, have members pay membership fees?
Corp Sponsorship?

I agree on much of this. But as with most things it comes down to money. Do
members have a financial incentive to join and what is the financial model
to keep the Coop moving forward as a success.

Several small IXes have grown quite a bit with no or very small membership fees. Look at the ones I mentioned. I think SIX is the largest, but they're all not that tiny.

--
TTFN,
patrick