On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 06:56:56AM +0300, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
On Thu, 24 Aug 2006, Gunther Stammwitz wrote:
Exchange / Traffic on public exchange vlan / Number of members LINX: ~ 77 Gbps / 210 members AMS-IX: ???* Gbps / 244 members DE-CIX: 51 Gbps / 184 members
I'm curious if any US based IXs exceed 100Gbps. Or has Amsterdam and London become the center of the Internet universe?
Not everyone publishes their traffic stats, some pseudo-publically, and some not at all. The total for every Equinix Exchange in the US (thats Ashburn, New York Metro, Chicago, Dallas, San Jose, and Los Angeles) combined is currently only 93Gbps peak (a huge upsurge since they launched a 10GE product several months back, it was at 40Gbps before that). Equinix is pretty much the vast majority of interesting public peering in the US today, with the closest runners-up being PAIX Palo Alto (numbers unpublished, but speculation is around 35Gbps), followed by NYIIX (16Gbps). It is probably safe to speculate that AMSIX is as large or larger than all of the public peering in the US combined. Why the difference? Well for starters, the US exchange points are typically priced at 3-6x the equivilent sized port at LINX AMSIX DECIX etc, so it just doesn't make economic sense for most US networks to peer publically. Also, US exchange points are almost all run by commercial facility operators who use the ix's to promote colocation and crossconnects in their facilities, vs the European exchange points who are colocation facility neutral. The US IX operators are not motivated to promote "as many people as possible on the exchanges", since this just means increased costs of operating the switches with no new colo and reduced crossconnect revenue. They're satisfied with keeping the exchanges priced at a premium, as an "entry level" point for new users and "low speed peer aggregator" for bigger networks, and then making everyone else use private peering. Thus the vast majority of peering in the US happens via private interconnection instead of via public peering. Of course this is a self feeding cycle too, because of the low cost and ease of entry there are hundreds of networks of every ilk peering at the European exchanges, which means there are far more open-peering people compared to the US exchanges. This makes it very attractive for even US based companies to get started peering with a pseudowire to Europe, compared with going to a US exchange. Also, not that it matters (because the absurdly high pricing has kept new customer turnup at an absolute minimum), but most of the facilities where the US exchange points are run from are currently "sold out", particularly to new customers. :) -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)