[snip]
Does anybody have some numbers they're able to share? In the "two small ISPs in the boonies" scenario, *is* there enough cross traffic to make an interconnect worth it? (I'd expect that gaming/IM/email across town to a friend on The Other ISP would dominate here?) Or are both competitors too busy carrying customer traffic to the same sites elsewhere (google, youtube, amazon, etc)? Phrased differently, how big/small a cross-connect is worth the effort?
Or at the cogent website ($4/meg) do the cost justify peering anymore? Obviously some of this always depends on the loop costs. Going to try to write something up that would be useful for smaller ISPs. The BGP barrier IMHO is quite high in most cases, not all the small ISPs carry their routes out to the edge in the same manner as the larger SPs. - Jared In our efforts, BGP hasn't come up as often as the Cogent (low cost) issue. I think there are two aspects, one is the opportunity. If you need to build or bury it gets pretty tough to keep costs below $4/meg. The second is traffic volume, if you can set up a peering connection for $200 per month for a full GE you need to stuff 50 Mb/s over the link to break even. That may be tough unless you have an anchor institution like a college or a content network. Rural wholesale (delivered to ISP) is going at $50-60 per Mb in large parts of the US. That brings the breakeven to about 4 Mb which is much easier for the small guys. I think the dominate application driving cross connects right now is might be business VPN between the small ISPs either at L2 or L3. Also, keep in mind though the cheap Internet is only at a limited number of metro area and you still need to pay to transport that Internet back to your network. jay