I guess they would be more interesting deployed in Ashburn or some place similar because you could exclude the cost of "bringing" traffic to the exchange if the equipment (and bits) are already transported through that facility.
Certainly there are some of us who would see this as advantageous. The cost of going through the Equinix public switch is relatively high, high enough that at the point we could justify it, it's cheaper and easier to just run a private connection or ten, and have more peering capacity, which turns into an argument against the Equinix service. Were it just the cost of a cross-connect plus a modest membership fee, with at least some other participants that had a relatively open peering policy, it would be quite interesting. Bonus points for being able to buy transit or routes. I had been working towards doing something like this in the Milwaukee area years ago, but the volume and interest wasn't quite there. I can't easily see it failing in the same way in Ashburn... there are a bunch of people who we exchange traffic with that are in the XXMbps range, maybe not enough to justify a private cross connect, but certainly good enough for a shared switch. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.