Also sprach hardie@equinix.com
This is especially true if you consider traffic exchange to occupy more than two points on the spectrum than just Free---Paid Transit.
Using this statement as a hopping off place, and not trying to contradict you in any way as I largely agree with you. I think what it comes down to is that you get the best connectivity for the lowest price. Considering in the price calculation the ability to maintain that connectivity. Radical thought, huh? :) Seriously though, IgLou has transit with uu.net and att.net. Given our size, we really aren't actively considering any other transit connections at the moment as our current setup meets our needs. That being said, if anyone has a great deal on transit...don't not call because we're not actively considering it. :) What I am looking into some is peering relationships...usually fairly small scale given the scale of IgLou's network. Particularly at this point we're considering it primarily with setups that are predominantly content sources, as we're predominantly content sinks, and this is the best way to get the most bang for the buck in our peering, by peering with networks that predominantly source content rather than sink it. *shrug* I probably will not get more than one or two significant peering connections at present, however, because the cost and effort of maintaining them would outstrip the benefits. It all comes down to cost-benefit tradeoffs. If you have more transit or peering connections that you can keep on top of for maintenance and scaling, then adding more will likely end up degrading your network. I feel that IgLou is at that point for transit, but could still benefit from peering connections, and that's really the only thing on my plate that I'm looking at currently. If/when we get a couple of peering connections, then there will be enough that I won't be able to keep on top of them and I won't add anymore until we grow our resources to be able to manage them better. Its really just not all that difficult of a concept to grasp. -- Jeff McAdams Email: jeffm@iglou.com Head Network Administrator Voice: (502) 966-3848 IgLou Internet Services (800) 436-4456