On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 7:23 AM, Todd Underwood <toddunder@gmail.com> wrote:
it's also not entirely obvious what the point of having local IXes that serve these kinds of collections of people.
how much inter-ASN traffic is there generally for a city of 100k people, even if they all have 1Gb/s connections? are they all torrenting, accessing local business web pages that are hosted locally, streaming video from local streaming caches? if a local IX is a good place for a llnw, akamai, ggc, netflix cache node, i can see it, but that's about it.
They are microcosms of larger areas - think gamers, B2B, local support/RDP, etc. When there's ~25ms extra latency ANC<->SEA, every little bit helps. It also lets us function locally when there are major external outages. Finally, there's a psychological benefit. It drove me nuts to have my traffic shipped to Seattle to end up literally one block away. :) It's like when I tracked my Macbook from China -- stopping briefly in its palletized/containerized form in Anchorage on its way to Kentucky (UPS distribution), and then back to Anchorage ... days later. :) Royce