On Tue, Jun 05, 2001 at 02:01:57PM -0400, up@3.am wrote:

I've been starting to think about this...how is the financial burden divided? Who pays for the facilities? Say you have a good place, with lots of room, power, cooling, etc. Is it reasonable to collect some sort of colo or cross-connect fees from your peers? Of course, if everyone comes to you, they have to pay for the loops, and you don't...

the operating expenses can be substantially reduced if the parameters are defined appropriately. torix is physically managed on a best-effort basis by a core group of techs from the founding members. techs from newer members are welcome to help out. not that there are that many techical issues. TorIX is a switch (well, hopefully soon, two switches). there is not alot of management, or failure points there. the interface is cat5, 10 or 100mbit ethernet. there is some talk about getting gigE ports added, but that doesn't make things more complicated. the location of the switch is what is most important. it needs to be in a reasonably neutral place, and one that lots of people can drag circuits to. in the case of TorIX, this is in the RACO facilities at 151 front. cat5 can be dragged from anywhere in the building (at the members expense) or external circuits pulled in (again at the members expense). the location of the switch is currently in a members space, but a second switch is being installed in a RACO common area to provide more neutrality. we are also open to putting other switches in other places. no one member "owns" TorIX. TorIX is not intended to be a full-bore MAE-North. at a recent meeting some people were interested in making it more "professional" complete with SLA's and paid-staff, etc, etc. my comment was that they were welcome to start TorIX-II, but there was no reason to disband or mutate the existing facilities. for a small exchange, especially if you are looking to start with small or medium ISP's, you need to keep the monthly costs as low as possible. with TorIX, those monthly fees are zero. but each member bears their own costs of getting to the switch. -- [ Jim Mercer jim@reptiles.org +1 416 410-5633 ] [ Now with more and longer words for your reading enjoyment. ]