North American Network Operators Group
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Re: an over-the-top data center

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Mon Dec 01 09:08:13 2008
On Dec 1, 2008, at 4:58 AM, Måns Nilsson wrote: 
--On söndag, söndag 30 nov 2008 23.05.01 -0500 "Patrick W. Gilmore"
<[email protected]> wrote:

In Sweden, the reason to not choose NetNod (and to go with the smaller
exchangepoints) is price and only price. No swedish ISP I know of has
stated that the fact that the Stokab fibre is bought by the IXP and not the
ISP is a problem per se. Some might have a better wholesale deal than
NetNod has but that is still just about price.

I don't think any IXP can become a significant player on the Internet today by only attracting participants from the country in question. The Internet is not bound by political borders. (Usually. :)


Now compare that to forcing every single participant to use unknown fiber
paths into an unknown facility. When are these fibers groomed, and onto
which unknown paths? Which fiber maintenance schedules might impact me
without my knowledge? Which construction projects elsewhere in the city
might take me down and there's no way for me to even predict that? Etc.,
etc.

The fiber paths into these facilities are national security issues. Expect
them to be guarded accordingly (as in running them in specially blasted
tunnels 30-60 meters down in the ground for the last aggregated path to the
facility). I have not experienced more unpredictability nor more outages
because Netnod buys the cable than when the ISP does. Same cable. And
Stokab does indeed know where the cables are.

I'm glad to hear the fibers seem to be stable. Past performance is no guarantee of future profits and all that, but it is good to know care has been taken in the past.

As for the blasting of tunnels and national security angle, this is an IXP, not nuclear missile launch control. It should not be your only vector to get bits from point A to B. And if it is, then you have a larger problem than worrying about the facility withstanding physical attack.

And no, attaching to multiple NetNod nodes is not a solution, since only Stockholm has a large number of participants.


End of day, an IXP is not some magical thing. It is an ethernet switch allowing multiple networks to exchange traffic more easily than direct interconnection - and that is all it should be. It should not be mission critical. Treating it as such raises the cost, and therefore barrier to entry, which lowers its value.

--
TTFN,
patrick