On Wed, 15 Jan 1997, Paul A Vixie wrote:
Brett writes:
considered, isn't really needed. Rather than waste their money on equipment that all in all just doesn't need to be there, why not make it more economic for local players to get involved and cross connect to eachother. In the end
That means with 19 ISP's in a GIGAswitch-free room, there are 342 FIP's at a cost of, what, US$12000 each after discount? I'll betcha I can buy quite a few GIGAswitches for US$4.1M. Oops, that's not a fair comparison, since with a GIGAswitch I also need 19 FIP's. Figure that a fully configured GIGAswitch retails without discount for US$80K and that 19 FIPs are going to run another US$228K. That's still a *lot* less than 2*sum(n-1).
This is probably a worst-case scenario. What about Ethernet cross-connects using the 6 port cards? Or zero-mile T1's using the 8 port serial cards? And you are assuming a full mesh which isn't necessarily what people need. I don't think you can generalize about what a provider wants from an Exchange Point especially not in a world in which exchange points are breeding like rabbits. Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-250-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com