When we first lit our wavelength to Chicago, we had them terminate it in a cabinet at Equnix. We then had our transit provider terminate in the cabinet and we threw a patch cable in. No power ordered initially. It served its purpose for the interim, but we eventually put a switch in once we connected to Equnix's peering service too. During the period where we simply had a cross connect with no active equipment, we didn't really have any problems with it, but I agree it isn't the best situation. I was actually pretty amazed at how much traffic we had shift over to peering once we turned up - significant. I'd say that we now get 2/3 of our inbound by peering, the rest via transit. Netflix is the obvious reason... ----- Original Message --------------- Subject: Re: Buying IP Bandwidth Across a Peering Exchange From: Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com> Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 14:14:21 -0600 To: Rob Seastrom <rs@seastrom.com> Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> Yes, we could of course pay for some space and power with a shared hosting provider, but buying a full rack and power for a single router seems silly. The ideal person to buy the small amount of space and power from would be the transport provider that is transporting us to Equinix, but in most cases those are large providers like Level3 who aren't interested nor willing to sell us a quarter of a cabinet. If we were to get space directly with Equnix then we would have yet another cross connect from the transport provider to our rack. The whole point on getting to the exchange is to peer with providers like Netflix and Google as this would be for an eyeball network, but after you add up the cost of the rack, power, cross connects, exchange ports, etcs I am not seeing the value in doing so. Espically with some of the Tier 1's willing to sell us Gbps IP transit links for almost the cost of the transport back to an peering location. On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 12:13 PM, Rob Seastrom <rs@seastrom.com> wrote:
Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com> writes:
Some might ask why not get a cross connect to the provider. It is cheaper to buy an port on the exchange (which includes the cross connect to the exchange) than buy multiple cross connects. Plus we are planning on getting a wave to the exchange, and not having any physical routers or switches at the datacenter where the exchange/wave terminates at. Is this possible?
"Technically possible" and "advisable" are two different things. If you enjoy finger-pointing on the occasions where you are trying to smoke out performance issues, I encourage as many third, fourth, and fifth-party-managed network layers in the mix as possible. A wave with no way to test to the handoff point would of course be the icing on the cake.
Are you sure you can't afford to sublet a few ru of space from someone and pay for a couple extra cross connects?
-r