(Jared wrote): <snip>
Most people I've seen have little data or insight into their networks, or don't have the level that they would desire as tools are expensive or impossible to justify due to capital costs. Tossing in a recurring opex cost of DC XC fee + transport + XC fee + redundant aggregation often doesn't have the ROI you infer here. I've put together some models in this area. It seems to me the DC/real estate companies involved could make a lot (more) money by offering an OOB service that is 10Mb/s flat-rate for the same as an XC fee and compete with their customers.
Equinix does have a very aggressively priced 10Mb/s flat-rate OOB (single IP only but that's not that hard to work around) for essentially XC pricing. It's been stable but not something you'd rely on for 100% packet delivery to some other point on the Internet (so more for reaching a per-pop OOB than for making a coherent OOB network with a bunch of monitoring running 24x7). Still, it's a good value for what it is. <snip>
- Jared
Avi Freedman CEO, Kentik avi at kentik dot com