Sean Donelan writes:
Currently about 5%-15% of my traffic gets routed over the UtahREP.
please describe measurement technique.
[snip]
Traffic elasticity is an interesting issue. How much traffic is being exchanged, which wouldn't otherwise be exchanged? In other words is the existance of the local exchange point actually causing more traffic to be generated. This is a what if question. If you didn't have the local exchange, would you still haul highly elastic traffic like USENET across your long-haul links? Or is it highly elastic traffic like at-home students or employees who use a local ISP modem pool for access instead of dialing directly into the remote institution.
[snip]
And finally, usability. The I know it when I see it issue. The right combination of adequate speed, low latency, and little congestion that gives the end-user a 'good' connection. Since we still have a hard time defining what is 'good' this is the hardest one to measure. I can really only measure this indirectly, such as the number of customer compliants or through surveys of non-customers. In general, customers of ISPs connected to the local exchange point report better connections to resources on ISPs also attached to the local exchange point than to those same ISPs before the exchange point.
Something of interest here might be centralising services at NAPs. For example, putting a news server at the NAP running Cylone, the NAP purchasing a news only T1 (or whatever) to serve the box, and then participants who would like a news feed getting it directly from this box and paying extra. Another intersting saving is via proxy neighboring over a local NAP. Rather significant traffic savings have been observed in local NAPs inside Australia by participants neighboring squids. AU being a rather heavy user of caching compared to the US. Other ideas were tossed around including a central DNS server/cache, gaming servers, etc.. and one peering network inside AU (Ausbone) is doing this. (But they provider inter-NAP links, which isn't really applicable here in this discussion). Just out of curiousity, since I'm not in the US, how much would a T1 cost point to point inside a city, without default IP transit? With IP transit? T3? Anything else 'common' ? Adrian