Right now the performance of the NSFnet is pretty bad (even the T3 network performance is worse than a CIX provided connection) so you are probably doing your customers a service by using the CIX to route packets instead of the NSFnet. But let's look into the future where ANS finally gets its technical act together and the T3 NSFnet really starts to hum. Add in much greater use of the CIX and I can see an inverted picture where the CIX is more of a bottleneck than the NSFnet.
Really? What do you base your assertions on? I can tell you right now that the NSFNET T3 backbone has come a long, long way since last October. (Mark Knopper and his gang must have been in hell back then!) The reliablity has been extremely good. I will admit that the traffic probably isn't taking full advantage of the speed of the T3 pipes right now, but the upgrade of the T3 cards in the NSSes will hopefully improve that situation. The throughput is still definitely higher than a T1 though... So, are there people still having problems with the T3 backbone? I have failed to see any evidence that "the NSFnet is pretty bad," at least worse than a CIX T1 connections. --zawada __