On Tue, 20 Aug 2013, Jonathan Stewart wrote:
You named 2 IXPs, and only got one right. A year ago, there were two active: TORIX in Toronto, and OTTIX in Ottawa. Ottawa is too close to Toronto to have an impact, so OTTIX has remained small. Having only 2 open
That's not entirely accurate. The fact is the Ottawa market - as well as the Eastern Ontario market, had a large number of very small ISPs in the area a decade ago. So OttIX had many ISPs be litle traffic. After a major market conolidation (buyouts,m mergers, etc) the number of peers declined quite a bit - but the traffic increased. In the meantime, within the province of Ontario, LANX costs became effectively the same (to us) to go from one end of the city to the other as the cost to go between cities. Even at the $dayjob, we took advantage of this and simply dragged another LANX over to TorIX. Heck, even OttIX had a POP at 151 Fron in Toronto which saw enormous growth. So in that sense, OttIX achieved one of its primary objectives and that was to drive transit costs down in what is effectively a one-company town.
IXPs, 400 km apart in a country 5000 km wide is not good enough.
5000km in length by 100Km in width as most of the population lives within 100Km of the Canada-US border, but yes, it's a big country.
Since then, QIX in Montreal has opened up from a research-only IXP, to a neutral peering facility. MBIX in Winnipeg has started, and YYCIX in Calgary is up and running as well. Vancouver is still lacking.
BCNet would beg to differ. :-) There's also VicTX in Victoria run by BCNet. (Granted, some might simply say those are nothing more than BCNet aggregation hubs - but judge for yourselves please.)
Currently, the aforementioned established big players are not at all interested in our exchange, they don't talk to us. Only exception is Hurricane Electric, who recently joined, dropping wholesale bandwidth costs in Winnipeg *dramatically*.
IXPs in Canada have been particularly effective in doing this, especially in Ottawa where in 2003 it was something like $550 per megabit/month. One of the OttIX members (IGS) offered $200 and well, a number of OttIX peers went to town with that. The rate grudgingly dropped to $333 by 2006 until $MGMT allowed me to break out in other places to leverage even lower pricing. As of 2011 the best price I could get here was $90 but we already got out of Dodge by then. All to say the effects of an IXP in a certain locale were positive for the end-consumers (ISPs mainly) of transit.
BTW, in Winnipeg we still have the problem of cross-continent traffic paths to send data across the street. Worst case is something like this: Winnipeg--Chicago--Toronto--Vancouver--Calgary--Winnipeg. That's a 15,000 km round trip. MBIX can help with that.
For a good view of the Canadian perspective on those and more, see: http://www.ixmaps.ca/index.php We've contributed a lot of traceroutes, ditto via $dayjob given the diverse footprint of the network (national research backbone - not CANARIE's though) just to see how our traffic runs about the country as well as outside. Some surprises there. (I think CIRA funded that one as well.) wfms