Actually, I think the issue is not about moving. It is more about developing
*new* facilities now to handle the forecasted demands. As the Internet becomes
more pervasive and the expectations of the users (and investors) become
higher, we (the Internet access provider community) will need to have better,
cheaper, faster, more resilient, etc. etc. networks. I find it hard to fathom
a completely pervasive network routing through a few exchange points. As the
national telco infrastructure evolved over the last few decades (with CO's on
just about every corner) so will go the Internet. I admire the foresight of
those attempting to develop new exchange points. I do not envy the uphill
battle they have before them. des
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From: owner-nanog(a)merit.edu on behalf of Alec H. Peterson
Sent: Monday, December 02, 1996 10:07 AM
To: Nathan Stratton
Cc: Paul A Vixie; nanog(a)merit.edu
Subject: Re: Exchanges that matter...
On Nov 29, 1996, Nathan Stratton wrote:
>
> Yes, true, it would be great of MAE-West of PACBell just moved to PAIX,
> but I don't think it is worth adding a view when you have established NAPs
> in the area. I learned this when I when I was building Atlanta-NAP I
> wanted to build a place better then PAIX (and they did the best job so
> far), but I found out that people don't care. If I build a NAP that was
> 100 times nicer then MAE-East (and that would not be hard at all) people
> would not just move.
Asking people to relocate their high-bandwidth peering point
connections is not likely to be successful unless you give them a
cheap, easy way to do it. Using the MAE-east/Atlanta-NAP example, why
would people pay thousands more dollars per month to backhaul traffic
to Atlanta when they can exchange it locally? It just doesn't make
sense, and really defeats the purpose of having a local exchange
point. Sure, the number of hops would be the same, but if a packet
has to move between two DC-area providers, it makes little sense for
it to travel down the east coast and back up again.
But the biggest reason that people will not move their peering point
connections from one place to another is that it will break things.
Also, it will be a huge pain in the ass. If things are functioning
reasonably well, there is little point in moving everything around.
Alec
--
+------------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
|Alec Peterson - chuckie(a)panix.com | Panix Public Access Internet and UNIX|
|Network Administrator/Architect | New York City, NY |
+------------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
