At 08:38 PM 10/22/96 -0400, Gordon Cook wrote:

*BUT* here is my question. Don't private interconnects essentially provide a new apex for the internet? One that pushes interconnects at the major exchange points down a level. Sprint, MCI, UUNET, and BBN are clearly the four largest players by market share. All of them have multiple private interconnects with each other. perhaps ANS does as well. AGIS certainly does not. So in this sense, the "6" have not really become 15 but rather have become 4 or maybe 5.

This begs the question: What value do 'private' interconnects/exchanges provide? I would submit that the answer isn't readily acknowledgeable, or at least, has not been explored to the extents necessary. One Big Win (tm) with the creation of local interconnects (for instance, strategic locations in Asia & South/Central America), is that local content providers can find a way to swap bits without transiting all the way back to the United States; in my opinion, we need more exchanges to decrease the amount of traffic contributing to this problem. The value of private exchanges/peering between the larger global providers is that they can get traffic off of their backbone before it reaches exchange points which are already glowing in the dark. I don't think this needs much explanation. Part of the problem is that, the more BGP peers, the more the statistical chances for instability. Unfortunately, I don't readily see a solution to this particular issue, if large providers are not economically incentivized to build more, smaller interconnect points which allow tier-2 and tier-3 providers to peer with them. Then again, I don't pretend to understand *all* of the corporate political, technical and economic, issues. ;-) - paul (en route to Ann Arbor)