Mike Johnson writes:

I'm not a customer, but I spoke with a salesdriod there. All they do is go in, set up their own geographicly disperse private peering points and link them together with their private backbone. They set these things up by buying service from the other large backbone folk. The idea being that, in general, if they can get their traffic onto the same backbone that the end user is connected to, then it's avoided the public peering points. It's a good theory. Dunno if it works.

In my opinion its not a peering point. Its an aggregation point of several carriers into one AS. There is no magic to this if you have a direct link to 5 of the biggest providers [1, 701, 1239 etc] then you have a good control over how your traffic flows on the outbound, a few lines of perl, rping and a BGP table dump and you can probably, to a limited extent have some effect on the path your traffic takes. I suspect that trying to implement the same architecture outside of the United States will be substantially harder though. Also at some point in time, one of their access nodes is bound to have a subsAtantial ammounts of traffic and then they would have to link some of the other access nodes to this one to avoid other congestion points. One thing that is good about the idea, is that they have a customer contract with their transit suppliers with some fairly useful SLA's contained within, which should mean they have some control over the quality of those providers. Regards, Neil. -- Neil J. McRae - Alive and Kicking D O M I N O . O R G neil@DOMINO.ORG Regards, Neil.