On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 11:49:16AM -0400, Brian Cashman wrote:
I'd be happy to consider such a thing. If you could forward to me what you have from 7 years ago I'd be interested in seeing that. The was before my time at Merit. Also, John, I'd be happy to discuss a private peering arrangement, if you're interested.
A problem, I'll have to admit, is that Ann Arbor hasn't had very good external connectivity. This is changing and we (Merit) are in the process of implementing some high speed links (OC-48) out of town (and out of state).
I've found that a lot of people in Michigan tend to appear at the Phone Michigan (aka Mcleoud) facility and the Coast to Coast facilities (Flint and Pontiac). The problem is there is no available switch fabric. It would probally only take a little prodding of Coast and quite a bit more from Mcleoud to get them to turn something up.
In general, I believe that Michigan hasn't had very good connectivity due in part (perhaps mostly) to its geography. Most carrier facilities enter in the southeast, go north to Detroit, then go west along I-94 until they leave Michigan into Indiana. It's been pretty rare to find fiber north of I-94 which only sits about 50 miles north of Michigan's southern border. The lakes on each side preclude a nice neat east to west fiber build. And don't ask about Michigan's upper peninsula. A different LATA with no available facilities (to my knowledge) across the Mackinac bridge. So, everything between the two halves of the state goes
My understanding is Ameritech (the ILEC) is the only carrier with facilities across the bridge.
through other states. Michigan is a tough state to run a statewide network. At any rate, things are looking better.
A lot of carriers have facilities in Southfield as L3 has a colo there they have opened. Someone would just need to lease a cage and operate a switch in there. I'm sure it would be easy to get a list of customers that are there that have bgp clue.
Anyway, I think that lack of good facilities has hampered the creation of a public peering point in Michigan. The facilities situation seems to be getting better so perhaps the peering point situation will too.
Yes, this is the problem we had also at my previous job. We had to pull a connection to AADS to get regional peering and negotiate for a ethernet cable with others to peer in the coast and phone-mi facilities. - jared -- Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from jared@puck.nether.net clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.