On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 09:50:22AM -0700, Owen DeLong wrote: [...]
I'm always surprised that folks at smaller exchanges don't form consortiums to build a mutually beneficial transit AS that connects to a larger remote exchange.
In my experience, the price of buying transit from established players has always been close to the combined price of buying a circuit and establishing some form of presence at a remote exchange. Close enough that everyone was willing to just pay for transit without the added administrative overhead of the transit consortium. I've seen such transit consortiums that pretend to be exchange points as well -- but that's a slightly different beast. I've also seen where the folks that should peer don't because they all have mutual transit providers, and the cost of interconnection is higher than the incremental transit costs for their cross-ASN traffic. You can't argue "increased route splay" when the circuit costs dominate the equation. Internet in the hinterlands is a tough ride compared to fiber-rich areas... But it keeps getting better, so there is hope.