On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Randy Bush wrote:
no. in the first case, you're just hiding the incremental costs. eventually, some bean counter is gonna want to recover them, and then folk get quite unhappy.
What costs are you referring to? You basically need a few hours time per month from engineers and billing department. This for an exchange that has 20 ISPs connected to it. The amount of traffic isn't really a factor, but the one I know of and am part of running carries multi-gigabit.
This is simply untrue. Whilst it is possible to establish an exchange with minimal cost if it is successful your costs will soon escalate. To provide carrier class service for the worlds top carriers you need to invest in the latest hardware, you need to house multiple switches and odfs in suites, you need to pay a team of engineers to run the exchange 24x7, you need to maintain vendor support agreements.
From empirical data this cost is in the order of a few million dollars per year. This may not be a lot of money compared to the annual turnover of the large carriers but eg for a typical exchange $5m between 150 companies is on average about $3k/mo each (of course this will likely be skewed so that the top few companies pay more).
If you're exchange is in an already developed location then my observation is that you need to have the above if you are to attract the larger networks which in turn brings in the traffic and noc requirements that see increasing costs. Steve