So how do you reconcile the increasing number of private facilities? Although not exchange points in the truest sense ala MAEs and NAPs, they do carry an increasing percentage of cross-network traffic. The number of these types of facilities will grow. Maybe our difference here is that I count these and others do not. des ---------- From: Alex.Bligh Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 1996 1:50 PM To: Todd Graham Lewis Cc: Danny Stroud; nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Exchanges that matter...
On Wed, 4 Dec 1996, Todd Graham Lewis wrote:
Three NAPs per continent is plenty to serve this purpose; anything over this is reckless.
Woops. Three is a nice, round, theoretical number. Five is fine. Fifty is highly questionable to my mind. Thinking that more NAPs solves the problem is just flat wrong.
Hmmm.. Not sure "continent" is the right granularity here. In North America telecoms prices do not in general take enormous hikes when you cross state borders. In (say) Europe they do. Lines between European countries often cost more than lines between a given European country and the US. Also content and thus traffic is far more localised to each country due to language difficulties (well that part that doesn't go to English speaking countries anyway). So 3-5 NAPs (or whatever) per homogenous area (homogenous in content and in telecoms charging) perhaps. But ridiculous telco regulation within Europe and language differences makes a very strong case for at least one NAP per country (we dump about 50% of our UK traffic off in the UK). Alex Bligh Xara Networks
So how do you reconcile the increasing number of private facilities? Although not exchange points in the truest sense ala MAEs and NAPs, they do carry an increasing percentage of cross-network traffic. The number of these types of facilities will grow. Maybe our difference here is that I count these and others do not. des
My point was not in relation to the NAP vs Private interconnect debate, nor the many NAP vs few NAPs debate, just when measuring "few" or "many" they should be done in the context of telecoms pricing and locality of content, and thus "NAPs per country" not "NAPs per continent" was the appropriate ratio. I've since been told telecoms pricing between Canada and US is almost as bad as between (say) UK and FR in terms of the hike as you go over the border. I don't think many people would argue each extra US NAP diminishes the case for an extra Canadian NAP. However each successful US west coast NAP does probably diminish the case for another successful NAP on the US west coast, or possibly the US in total. FYI my view on the private interconnect versus public IXP interconnect (probably not very informed as I don't have many private interconnects with Sprint et al :-) ) is that if public IXPs worked as well as private interconnects (didn't get overloaded, no interference to traffic from third parties, peer to peer bandwidth always available at STM-1 or above etc. etc.) there would not be nearly so much of a case for private interconnects (the "people whinging about peering" argument is valid but not relevant here as I'm assuming tier 1s would always connect to at least 1 IXP anyway and whinging is not proportional to no. of exchange points connected to I guess). In fact one could argue that we already have "public" IXPs run like this - the SDH/SONET equipment that runs the private circuits on private interconnects. Other than their invisibility to the customer, and the protocol, these aren't doing a very substantially different job from an ATM switch with VCs between different (off-site) peers. Perhaps someone should persuade Cisco to make a card running channelised STM-15 and start an IXP running with just mux/demux kit. Or maybe not... :-) More seriously the argument about routers and bottlenecks is relevant too - see Vadim's paper. Alex Bligh Xara Networks
---------- From: Alex.Bligh Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 1996 1:50 PM To: Todd Graham Lewis Cc: Danny Stroud; nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Exchanges that matter...
On Wed, 4 Dec 1996, Todd Graham Lewis wrote:
Three NAPs per continent is plenty to serve this purpose; anything over this is reckless.
Woops. Three is a nice, round, theoretical number. Five is fine. Fifty is highly questionable to my mind. Thinking that more NAPs solves the problem is just flat wrong.
Hmmm.. Not sure "continent" is the right granularity here. In North America telecoms prices do not in general take enormous hikes when you cross state borders. In (say) Europe they do. Lines between European countries often cost more than lines between a given European country and the US. Also content and thus traffic is far more localised to each country due to language difficulties (well that part that doesn't go to English speaking countries anyway). So 3-5 NAPs (or whatever) per homogenous area (homogenous in content and in telecoms charging) perhaps. But ridiculous telco regulation within Europe and language differences makes a very strong case for at least one NAP per country (we dump about 50% of our UK traffic off in the UK).
Alex Bligh Xara Networks
Could it be that private facilities are much easier to get things done in? If only 3-4 networks are there, and you already want to exchange traffic with each of these networks and you know you can start as HSSI between them, and then add higher speed interfaces as needed in a few days not weeks, why wouldn't you go? I am thinking of the MCI CoLo in St. Louis, any facts are purely accidental. -Deepak. On Thu, 5 Dec 1996, Danny Stroud wrote:
So how do you reconcile the increasing number of private facilities? Although not exchange points in the truest sense ala MAEs and NAPs, they do carry an increasing percentage of cross-network traffic. The number of these types of facilities will grow. Maybe our difference here is that I count these and others do not. des
---------- From: Alex.Bligh Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 1996 1:50 PM To: Todd Graham Lewis Cc: Danny Stroud; nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Exchanges that matter...
On Wed, 4 Dec 1996, Todd Graham Lewis wrote:
Three NAPs per continent is plenty to serve this purpose; anything over this is reckless.
Woops. Three is a nice, round, theoretical number. Five is fine. Fifty is highly questionable to my mind. Thinking that more NAPs solves the problem is just flat wrong.
Hmmm.. Not sure "continent" is the right granularity here. In North America telecoms prices do not in general take enormous hikes when you cross state borders. In (say) Europe they do. Lines between European countries often cost more than lines between a given European country and the US. Also content and thus traffic is far more localised to each country due to language difficulties (well that part that doesn't go to English speaking countries anyway). So 3-5 NAPs (or whatever) per homogenous area (homogenous in content and in telecoms charging) perhaps. But ridiculous telco regulation within Europe and language differences makes a very strong case for at least one NAP per country (we dump about 50% of our UK traffic off in the UK).
Alex Bligh Xara Networks
participants (3)
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Alex.Bligh -
Danny Stroud -
Deepak Jain