I’ve found that most of the CDNs that matter are in one facility in Houston, the Databank West (formerly Cyrus One) campus. We are about to light up a POP there so we’ll at least be able to get PNIs to them. There is even an IX in the facility, but it’s relatively small (likely because the operator wants near-transit pricing to get on it) so we’ll just PNI what we can for now. 

On Oct 15, 2023, at 08:50, Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net> wrote:


Houston is tricky as due to it's geographic scope, it's quite expensive to build an IX that goes into enough facilities to achieve meaningful scale. CDN 1 is in facility A. CDN 2 in facility B. CDN 3 is in facility C. When I last looked, it was about 80 driving miles to have a dark fiber ring that encompassed all of the facilities one would need to be in.



-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com

Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com

From: "Tim Burke" <tim@mid.net>
To: "Dave Taht" <dave.taht@gmail.com>
Cc: "Network Neutrality is back! Let´s make the technical aspects heard this time!" <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net>, "libreqos" <libreqos@lists.bufferbloat.net>, "NANOG" <nanog@nanog.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 14, 2023 10:45:47 PM
Subject: Re: transit and peering costs projections

I would say that a 1Gbit IP transit in a carrier neutral DC can be had for a good bit less than $900 on the wholesale market.

Sadly, IXP’s are seemingly turning into a pay to play game, with rates almost costing as much as transit in many cases after you factor in loop costs.

For example, in the Houston market (one of the largest and fastest growing regions in the US!), we do not have a major IX, so to get up to Dallas it’s several thousand for a 100g wave, plus several thousand for a 100g port on one of those major IXes. Or, a better option, we can get a 100g flat internet transit for just a little bit more.

Fortunately, for us as an eyeball network, there are a good number of major content networks that are allowing for private peering in markets like Houston for just the cost of a cross connect and a QSFP if you’re in the right DC, with Google and some others being the outliers.

So for now, we'll keep paying for transit to get to the others (since it’s about as much as transporting IXP from Dallas), and hoping someone at Google finally sees Houston as more than a third rate city hanging off of Dallas. Or… someone finally brings a worthwhile IX to Houston that gets us more than peering to Kansas City. Yeah, I think the former is more likely. 😊

See y’all in San Diego this week,
Tim

On Oct 14, 2023, at 18:04, Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This set of trendlines was very interesting. Unfortunately the data
> stops in 2015. Does anyone have more recent data?
>
> https://drpeering.net/white-papers/Internet-Transit-Pricing-Historical-And-Projected.php
>
> I believe a gbit circuit that an ISP can resell still runs at about
> $900 - $1.4k (?) in the usa? How about elsewhere?
>
> ...
>
> I am under the impression that many IXPs remain very successful,
> states without them suffer, and I also find the concept of doing micro
> IXPs at the city level, appealing, and now achievable with cheap gear.
> Finer grained cross connects between telco and ISP and IXP would lower
> latencies across town quite hugely...
>
> PS I hear ARIN is planning on dropping the price for, and bundling 3
> BGP AS numbers at a time, as of the end of this year, also.
>
>
>
> --
> Oct 30: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos