On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
b) The price being charged for the public exchange ports is non-trivial (especially compared to the cost of transit these days!), and is billed on a port basis instead of a usage basis (at least in the US). Since public peering is treated as a "necessary evil", with traffic moved to much more economical private peers when they start getting full, no one wants to provision extra capacity ahead of demand (in fact, in the US it is exceedingly rare to see anyone with 2 ports on a single public exchange).
This is counter intuitive to me altho perhaps I need to better understand the IX operators income model. If I were a colo company who also operated an IX I'd want to encourage people to use my IX and put as much traffic over it. The logic being that operators gravitate towards these high bandwidth exchange areas and that means new business. The encouragement here would be to make the IX cost quite small.. of course the other benefit of succeeding in getting a lot of operators and traffic on your IX is you can publicise the data to show why you're better (or as good as) your competitors.. This doesnt affect their income from colo, support, cross connects so why not do it? Steve