On Thu, 16 Jan 1997, Paul A Vixie wrote:
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?
Ethernet is a slightly different case but only slightly. An ethernet switch costs a lot less than a GIGAswitch,
the cost of peering, unless and only unless you already have a private interconnect to the unchosen peer.
I guess I was visualizing something quite different from current exchanges. Rather than have an Ethernet switch I was thinking of using Ethernet point-to-point. And the exchange point was more like a big colo center in which you could set up as many private interconnects as you want at the lowest possible cost (interface ports plus installing a cable versus running T1's or DS3's across town). The colo nature of such a beast would lead ISP's to install terminal servers, web farms, etc which would have an effect on the topology. Squid cache hierarchies would be nice here as well. I'm not sure if this is a viable exchange point architecture yet but I think it will be viable and useful as the Internet scales through the next order of magnitude. My gut feel is that breaking out the traffic into lots of smaller non-shared circuits will be easier to manage and less susceptible to being swamped during overload conditions. Not that overloading cannot occur but the effects would be more isolated than if the overload occurs on a shared media. I think that people would be interested in traffic flow data that would either prove or disprove my theories. Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-250-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com