Bill Woodcock wrote:
On Mon, 11 Aug 2008, Deepak Jain wrote: > A "coop", best-effort switch fabric colo'd at a few sites would allow > participants to peer off traffic at a price of the order of a single > cross-connect (~$500/month per 10G port is possible, maybe less),
$0/month per 10G port is common enough.
https://www.seattleix.net/faq.htm
Why pay someone else to let you use an Ethernet switch? Presumably if you can configure BGP, plugging into an Ethernet switch is well within your core competency.
The only point of a fee would be to provide better than "when-we-get-around-to-it" support. Obviously there are ways to achieve this without a fee. There are other benefits too [like the ability to have a real non-profit structure, insurances, and others to address the inevitable subpoena, wire-tapping request, CNN reporter, etc]. The economization of cross-connects (a large percentage of a certain colo provider's gross revenues and profit growth) does NOT occur when each provider sets up its own L2 switch for its peers to connect to -- unless they can peer with each other over that switch too. Which brings you back to a coop. Deepak