"Kent W. England" <kwe@6SigmaNets.com> writes:

There is no point agreeing with the Big Backbone Network Engineers that the MAEs suck. It is in their best interest that the MAEs suck,

Hm. Well, it depends on how deep you want to get into conspiracy theories, of course. If there is a way to sell normalized services over an IXP such that the costs-versus-revenue split is not significantly worse than offering normal services over non-IXP technology, then there is no reason to dislike IXPs. There is technology to offer normalized services now, and apparently it is being put to some use. How much this is thought of depends on how holistically you want to view organizational financial structure and cash flow. A facilities based telco that is at an IXP that is not operated by itself is less likely to be thrilled by the thought of relatively small Internet access fees available there in comparison to the potentially very lucrative business that can be obtained through bundling Internet access as sugar in securing a more comprehensive account. (Hi, we're a telco. Buy our long distance and use our WAN outsourcing services and we will give you nearly free Internet connectivity. -- This is difficult to do at an IXP...) On the other hand, an organization that is running a large IXP and can do so without losing money -- for instance, when they are provided with a captive and unwilling market thanks to government pressure -- probably will be very fond of them, particularly if the infrastructure being paid for by the IXP participants can be turned into an aggregation point for their own Internet service offerings (and possibly, in the case of LECs who run IXPs, bundled in with other services like inter-campus WANs or even VPN telephony). (Hi. Welcome to our ATM switch. Did you know that we can make some VCs between you and University of XYZ, not to mention that we can offer a whole range of unregulated services thanks to this wonderful new NAP technology.) The thing about Internet Engineers is even the most evil greedy bastardlike ones mostly seem to want the Internet to work. Relying on IXPs which are bursting at the seams technologically and physically seems really dangerous. That some exchanges (I note you say MAEs) suck is a side-effect of their popularity. Keeping that popularity from exposing scaling problems beyond the IXPs is an intelligent design goal, which also may have convenient financial implications.

the CIX is crippled,

The CIX ceased to have any real function when ANS CO+RE captiulated. Now that Rick Adams has finally eaten Al Weis's lunch, the continued existence of the CIX is almost a joke. Sorry, Bob and John.

you aren't bugging them to plug into a high perf exchange, and that you, the little ISP, go out of business soon.

Um, interesting theory. Given some statistics on where traffic loads are and who seems to present what amount of aggregate traffic in the USA, I am not sure it's really tenable though.

THEY have private interconnects which you can't join.

How do you "join" a point-to-point circuit? My position on these private interconnects is that each party is offering some degree of connectivity and that normal business negotiations on the price of those services determines who pays whom what amount, if a deal is to be made at all. This is entirely like a negotiation on pricing done between any two entities on the Internet. Peering, 102: it's exactly the same as any other deal on connectivity. (cf. Vadim Antonov's question two years and change ago, "does anyone ever actually pay list prices?") Most of these private point-to-point circuits are negotiated in circuit pairs, with each party paying for one out of every two circuits. Long discussions sometimes happen about who should pay for which of a pair of circuits and whether there should be some further consideration (financial or otherwise) even within a contractual framework that is geared to make this sort of thing straightforward.

Find a co-lo where you can cross-connect without being robbed or build your own NAP, just don't use DEC-designed Gigaswitches and FDDI. Use full duplex 100 Mbps Ethernet switch or find an old Fore switch cheap.

This is good advice except that there are MTU implications wrt Ethernet that need considering. Personally I am hoping that people start fixing little things like the old decision to assign low default MTUs and MSSes to remote things. Something useful to consider is that there is no difference between a properly designed router and a properly designed switch, and that given a next-hop-resolution scheme (tunnels, tag switching, you name it) a router acting as a switch (a "srouter") only needs to know about its immediate adjacencies in order for connectivity to work. Sean.