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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Coop Peering Fabric??
On 12 Aug 2008, at 04:15, Deepak Jain wrote: A "coop", best-effort switch fabric colo'd at a few sites would allow participants to peer off traffic at a price of the order of a single cross-connect (~$500/month per 10G port is possible, maybe less) Most of the Internet Exchanges in Europe that quickly spring to mind as successful, are run as co-operative entities, similar to what you describe. Specifically, most (all?) of the larger ones over here run as independent bodies that are owned mutually -- that is to say, owned by all of the participators at the exchange. The model is popular, and many hundreds of GB/s of traffic is exchanged on switches run by mutual organisations in Europe. This works really well because it means there is no commercial/profit motivation to operate significantly above cost-recovery levels. Here, costs mean the CapEx, OpEx, and any community/member sanctioned projects. Where it breaks is when we have to tell a network with lots of traffic that in order to participate at the exchange, they have to become a member (part owner) of the organisation. Due to organisational or even regulatory issues, it may not be legal to sell services (exchange ports) to non members/owners. This doesn't frighten the engineer asking for a connection, but it causes some concern at C*O level ("err, I might have to declare this to shareholders/regulators...") I think my message to you would be that if you have a bunch of colleagues at other organisations near you that want to start peering ... configure a switch, peer, and take it from there as you grow ! I hope your new exchange is successful !
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