No public exchange architecture can hope to cope with the massive amounts of traffic being exchanged between the larger backbone networks. Public exchanges are good entry points for new networks while they build their customer base and traffic levels. At some point private interconnects must take over in order for a company to continue to provide the level of connectivty and service that their customers expect. The next operational issue that I forsee is the effective scaling of private interconnect bandwidth (especially with the lack of real port density on a certain router vendor's product). Mark dhudes@hudes.org wrote:
Isn't the push to MAE-ATM ? For better or worse -- the FDDI switch MAE can't hope to keep up when people are building OC-48 cross-country backbones. All that traffic goes someplace. It becomes expensive to have multiple ports on the FDDI switch paying for each.