to: ISP's at mae-west we submit for your valued consideration a proposition http://www.nlanr.net/Caida/maewest.cache.html (first few paragraphs of web page included below) k and dw nlanr/caida (under we-run-commodity-infrastructure supervision from steve feldman (maewest), bill woodcock (zocalo), and david meyer (UO) ) -------------------------------------------------------- web caching as a viable Exchange Point Service proposed business-compatible model of web caching as a service provided at a NAP background NLANR has been operating a national public web caching system for about two years, as part of a research proposal sponsored by the National Science Foundation to architect and deploy prototype Internet information provisioning infrastructure. While the project has been an enormously successful `proof-of-concept' to the Internet community, especially internationally where it was received subjected to far higher and faster accelerating demand than we intended, participation in a cooperative global web caching mesh has for a variety of reasons been slower to catch on in the United States. A significant barrier to the use of caching by ISPs in the United States is the lack of a discernable pricing and business model to support caching as a commericial Internet service, either independently, packaged with a backbone service, or packaged with exchange point connectivity service. NLANR's project has allowed the development and deployment of a strong research code platform, as well as a prototype infrastructure that has recevied international recognition for its operationally pivotal role in the Internet. However, partly because of the tremendous success and resulting expectations of this `prototype' infrastructure, NLANR has not had the budget or cycles to pursue penetration of the U.S. commercial Internet market, partially expecting it to catch on from its own momentum. In 1997, NSF approved a follow-on award to use the by then globally-entrenched NLANR caching infrastructure for extended architectural investigation and experimentation. We maintain a project plan timeline, status reports, and cache status page including information on upgrades, major configuration changes, and outages. More importantly, we are now in a position to move forward with architectural models of caching that are more compatible with commerically-provisioned commodity intrastructure, and in which ISPs themselves will have an incentive to participate. On 1 December 1997, we are deploying a prototype web cache service at MAE-West, specifically designed to demonstrate the viability of a commercial model for providing web caching service. purpose The principal purpose of this peering-point-colocated Squid cache is to provide an easily accessible (no-AUP, low hop-count, low latency) alternative to the current vBNS-hosted root caches. The secondary purpose of this cache is as a demonstration of the feasibility of introducing self-supporting caches into the main stream of the Internet's core. Having a web cache at popular Internet exchange point provides ISPs an opportunity to leverage their presence at this strategic position in the Internet topology. Because the exchange point is a likely component of the paths of many web pages travelling across the Internet, storing web pages on a web cache at this point offers ISPs a potentially significant savings in bandwidth and end user latency by allowing them to retrieve pages there rather than having to go on to the original source.