Re: Peering point speed publicly available?
On or about July 1 2004, Erik <allegedly at> myevilempire.net> Amundson allegedly asked about peering point bandwidth. Some North American ISPs will tell you that under non-disclosure, but almost all of them will point you to their standards for peering, and you won't find many Tier 1 ISPs that peer at less than DS3 in the US, and probably not many in Canada, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, or Singapore either. That means the insertion delay is under 0.27ms, or about 27 fiber-miles, so it's less important than whether the peering is in San Francisco or San Jose. Queuing due to overload is really much more important than absolute size. Also, if you're dealing with ISPs that use public peering points, those may be a performance concern, but in the US that's mostly not Tier1-Tier1. (Linx is a different case entirely, assuming you want your traffic to be in London.) Smaller ISPs might be more talkative, or if you're having actual problems, like why your connection from minneapolis.example1.net to stpaul.example2.net goes through a peering point in San Francisco instead of peering in Minnesota or at most Chicago, big ISPs can also be pretty talkative.
On Jul 2, 2004, at 9:31 PM, Stewart, William C (Bill), RTSLS wrote:
Also, if you're dealing with ISPs that use public peering points, those may be a performance concern, but in the US that's mostly not Tier1-Tier1. (Linx is a different case entirely, assuming you want your traffic to be in London.)
Any particular reason you would worry about public peering points these days? The FDDI MAEs are dead, there is no head of line blocking any more. Every ethernet or ATM switch running a NAP I've seen in the last ... nearly half a decade is more than capable of passing all bits going through it without a problem, and then some. There might be a concern that, for instance, a provider would show up to a NAP, connect at GigE, then peer with 2 gigabits of traffic. But I fail to see why that is the public fabric's fault, or why things would be any different on private peering. The provider knows when their connection is congested, be it an ethernet to a NAP or an OC to another router. I also have not seen that affect the packets not going to the congested port (unlike some older NAPs). Public NAPs got a bad name many years ago because a few of them were poorly run, and some other ones had some technical difficulties, and some providers intentionally congested their public ports so they could say "see, public peering sucks", and lots of other reasons. Today, even free NAPs pass gigabits of traffic and do it robustly. If you have counter examples, I would be interested in seeing them. A lot of traffic passes on NAPs, and I'd hate to see any of it not get to where it was going. -- TTFN, patrick
On Sat, Jul 03, 2004 at 01:00:35AM -0400, Patrick W Gilmore wrote:
On Jul 2, 2004, at 9:31 PM, Stewart, William C (Bill), RTSLS wrote:
Also, if you're dealing with ISPs that use public peering points, those may be a performance concern, but in the US that's mostly not Tier1-Tier1. (Linx is a different case entirely, assuming you want your traffic to be in London.)
Any particular reason you would worry about public peering points these days?
The FDDI MAEs are dead, there is no head of line blocking any more. Every ethernet or ATM switch running a NAP I've seen in the last ... nearly half a decade is more than capable of passing all bits going through it without a problem, and then some.
What is with people in this industry, who latch onto an idea and won't let go? If someone was talking about 80286 based machines in 2004 we would all be in utter disbelief, but you can still routinely find people talking about "the MAEs" and "congested NAPs".
There might be a concern that, for instance, a provider would show up to a NAP, connect at GigE, then peer with 2 gigabits of traffic. But I fail to see why that is the public fabric's fault, or why things would be any different on private peering. The provider knows when their connection is congested, be it an ethernet to a NAP or an OC to another router. I also have not seen that affect the packets not going to the congested port (unlike some older NAPs).
a) Exchange points make a living convincing people to buy their product just like everyone else. When stupid people who don't know what they're doing buy transit, no one cares. When these same people who really don't know how to peer or manage their capacity start jumping on the "save money" or "improve performance" bandwagon without finding someone experienced to run it, they do stupid things. :) b) The price being charged for the public exchange ports is non-trivial (especially compared to the cost of transit these days!), and is billed on a port basis instead of a usage basis (at least in the US). Since public peering is treated as a "necessary evil", with traffic moved to much more economical private peers when they start getting full, no one wants to provision extra capacity ahead of demand (in fact, in the US it is exceedingly rare to see anyone with 2 ports on a single public exchange). Personally I've never understood why US exchange port operators havn't insisted on some kind of "80% utilization over Xth percentile and you must upgrade" rule. Since you don't normally have an idea how hot your peer is running their public port, you're really putting a *lot* of faith in your peers' ability to manage their traffic when you peer with them over a public exchange. Given how poorly some folks do this, and how quickly a congested port can degrate the reputation of an exchange point, it seems like this would at least be a very basic safety net (doesn't help if they only have 1 OC12 of backhaul off of that GigE port, but still better than nothing). Plus as I'm sure we all know the price of the exchange point switch port is covered by the first months' fees. What we're really paying for is the faith that the EP operator will keep things up and running, prevent forwarding loops, check for bad things being broadcasted, maybe invest in a bigger switch down the road, and be able to convince others to join so that there is a reason to bother peering there, etc. The extra cost of the ports is really quite trivial.
Public NAPs got a bad name many years ago because a few of them were poorly run, and some other ones had some technical difficulties, and some providers intentionally congested their public ports so they could say "see, public peering sucks", and lots of other reasons.
Some still do. At the very least, I can personally think of at least 4 different folks with public GigE exchange ports sitting at 920-960Mbps peak *RIGHT NOW*. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)
RAS> Date: Sat, 3 Jul 2004 02:07:06 -0400 RAS> From: Richard A Steenbergen RAS> What is with people in this industry, who latch onto an idea RAS> and won't let go? If someone was talking about 80286 based RAS> machines in 2004 we would all be in utter disbelief, but you RAS> can still routinely find people talking about "the MAEs" and RAS> "congested NAPs". Can I get a class C with that? [ snip ] RAS> Given how poorly some folks do this, and how quickly a RAS> congested port can degrate the reputation of an exchange RAS> point, it seems like this would at least be a very basic RAS> safety net (doesn't help if they only have 1 OC12 of RAS> backhaul off of that GigE port, but still better than RAS> nothing). To think some of us thought exchanges would save providers from tyrannical ILEC loops. ;-) Eddy -- EverQuick Internet - http://www.everquick.net/ A division of Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. - http://www.brotsman.com/ Bandwidth, consulting, e-commerce, hosting, and network building Phone: +1 785 865 5885 Lawrence and [inter]national Phone: +1 316 794 8922 Wichita _________________________________________________________________ DO NOT send mail to the following addresses: davidc@brics.com -*- jfconmaapaq@intc.net -*- sam@everquick.net Sending mail to spambait addresses is a great way to get blocked.
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
b) The price being charged for the public exchange ports is non-trivial (especially compared to the cost of transit these days!), and is billed on a port basis instead of a usage basis (at least in the US). Since public peering is treated as a "necessary evil", with traffic moved to much more economical private peers when they start getting full, no one wants to provision extra capacity ahead of demand (in fact, in the US it is exceedingly rare to see anyone with 2 ports on a single public exchange).
This is counter intuitive to me altho perhaps I need to better understand the IX operators income model. If I were a colo company who also operated an IX I'd want to encourage people to use my IX and put as much traffic over it. The logic being that operators gravitate towards these high bandwidth exchange areas and that means new business. The encouragement here would be to make the IX cost quite small.. of course the other benefit of succeeding in getting a lot of operators and traffic on your IX is you can publicise the data to show why you're better (or as good as) your competitors.. This doesnt affect their income from colo, support, cross connects so why not do it? Steve
At 02:07 AM 7/3/2004 -0400, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
b) The price being charged for the public exchange ports is non-trivial (especially compared to the cost of transit these days!), and is billed on a port basis instead of a usage basis (at least in the US). Since public peering is treated as a "necessary evil", with traffic moved to much more economical private peers when they start getting full, no one wants to provision extra capacity ahead of demand (in fact, in the US it is exceedingly rare to see anyone with 2 ports on a single public exchange).
<hi ras!> As one of the folks who gets questioned by Sales all the time about the reasons behind the multiple shared fabric ports at the IXs I'll gladly explain why we have 14 in the US at present and are preparing for ~5-10 abroad. 1. Trials. There are some networks who are not ready to properly manage private peering, they should be but they are not. A 90-day 'try before you buy' helps reduce the nickel & diming to a budget that remote hands and inventory adjustments chew. IMHO, if they do not have their operations activities in order they should not be a peer and that is one of the criteria we verify. 2. PNI sizing. Some networks really don't know how much traffic they will have to other networks when adding peering relations. If they argue about sizing it is best to drop them on to shared fabrics first to confirm with visuals what is flowing. 3. PNIs do not guarantee congestion avoidance. Unfortunately private peering does not remove congestion with some networks, it just shifts it. The peering relations community is well networked with each other. We know which network offenders have capacity issues regardless of public or private options. 4. International peers. Rarely are two network foot prints or goals for business the same. I would rather make available the unique international routes to our customers than miss that opportunity by being a public peering snob. This also allows the view towards new markets which rely heavily on shared fabrics. While not customary in the US, many EU peering IXs are multiple interconnected buildings managed by a single IX vendor at the shared fabric layer. Connecting to the shared fabric is an easy way to reach those networks in various buildings without dark fiber complexities. 5. Costs. Private peering is expensive, don't let anyone fool you. There is a resource investment in human terms that is rarely calculated properly, all the way from planning of inventory to planning for capacity augments after the physical install. It is often difficult to capture the cost to roll all those fibers that are improperly installed. This I'm sure you are painfully aware of <G>. 6. Management. Set a range of expectations on levels for monitoring, hardware, power, staff time, and capacity upgrade paths by designating some peers in a 'group' vs. monitoring all as individuals. I encourage authors of RFPs to stop placing such an unnecessary stigma on public peering. Those networks without the benefit of options for interconnecting should be penalized for failure to evolve. Quite likely they are not connected to the growing sources in the current peering game. What is this called... the bagel syndrome? -ren
On Sat, Jul 03, 2004 at 08:28:50AM -0400, ren wrote:
At 02:07 AM 7/3/2004 -0400, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
b) The price being charged for the public exchange ports is non-trivial (especially compared to the cost of transit these days!), and is billed on a port basis instead of a usage basis (at least in the US). Since public peering is treated as a "necessary evil", with traffic moved to much more economical private peers when they start getting full, no one wants to provision extra capacity ahead of demand (in fact, in the US it is exceedingly rare to see anyone with 2 ports on a single public exchange).
<hi ras!> As one of the folks who gets questioned by Sales all the time about the reasons behind the multiple shared fabric ports at the IXs I'll gladly explain why we have 14 in the US at present and are preparing for ~5-10 abroad.
You're definitely one of the rare few, especially given your size. In Europe it seems far more common for people to provision multiple ports and make certain they have capacity. In the US, even the couple of other folks I can think of who actually decided to provision multiple ports on the "modern exchanges" we're thinking of ended up sitting with congestion for some number of weeks before they actually did it. The general line of thinking here is "ok exchange port is getting full, lets move someone big to a PNI". Are there even any exchange points in the US who are actually doing 10GE right now (major and production, not someone tinkering)? One way or another, there is definitely room for improvement in the technology of public peering. Then again, with some classic exchanges (that are still considered viable, aka not mae's, aads, pbnap, etc) still charging the same prices they were back in 1999, aka more than transit, perhaps there is room for improvement in the financial model as well. :)
5. Costs. Private peering is expensive, don't let anyone fool you. There is a resource investment in human terms that is rarely calculated properly, all the way from planning of inventory to planning for capacity augments after the physical install. It is often difficult to capture the cost to roll all those fibers that are improperly installed. This I'm sure you are painfully aware of <G>.
*grumble* Indeed. The one redeeming quality of your favorite overpriced colo and mine is that when they go to hook up a crossconnect they extend it all the way to the gear without a dozen more tickets, they manage to hook it up correctly the first time, without 1-2 hours of handholding or playing "find the port", and without the need to dispatch techs or pay for half an hour of remote hands to roll the damn fibers. :) -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, ren wrote:
5. Costs. Private peering is expensive, don't let anyone fool you. There is a resource investment in human terms that is rarely calculated properly,
I agree with you 100%. Working at a nordic european operator being present at LINX, AMSIX and all the northern europe exchanges my reasoning is this: With IXes you buy one highspeed interface and get lots of peers and you can peer with people you might only exchange a few megabit/s with. Buying loads and loads of OC3s, T3s, OC12 to peer with and purchasing fiber patching to interconnect these just doesnt make sense when you can buy a GE or 10GE interface and get tens or hundreds of peers on that single interface without re-patching or establishing any new fiber connections. We have a very liberal peering policy which makes peering a pure operational decision, being handled by the line organisation. Each peering takes approx 5-10 minutes of someones time and that's it. No meetings of peering coordinators or alike, so those people are freed up to do better things. In a lot of the european exchanges all graphs of all ports on the IX is available to you as a member (or even publically available). If someone runs their port full, you probably know about it. Playing the peering game and trying to increase cost for someone else means you increase your own cost as well. Is that worth it? You have to be pretty big to justify it... -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Richard A Steenbergen wrote: > The price being charged for the public exchange ports is non-trivial Only at the (very few) commercial exchanges. The vast majority are free or of trivial expense. But some people really like to lose money, since then they get to hang out with VCs and feel like movers and shakers, rather than feeling like peons who have to actually turn a profit. > Personally I've never understood why US exchange port operators havn't > insisted on some kind of "80% utilization over Xth percentile and you must > upgrade" rule. No idea. It works well elsewhere. I think people here just don't like the idea of being told what to do. -Bill
Bill Woodcock writes on 7/3/2004 7:02 PM:
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Richard A Steenbergen wrote: > The price being charged for the public exchange ports is non-trivial
Only at the (very few) commercial exchanges. The vast majority are free or of trivial expense. But some people really like to lose money, since then they get to hang out with VCs and feel like movers and shakers, rather than feeling like peons who have to actually turn a profit.
Hah. http://www.nixi.org - described to a T. srs -- suresh ramasubramanian suresh@outblaze.com gpg EDEDEFB9 manager, security and antispam operations, outblaze ltd
The price being charged for the public exchange ports is non-trivial Only at the (very few) commercial exchanges. The vast majority are free or of trivial expense.
by count of small 10/100 switches or by traffic volume? it costs to build, maintain, and manage an exchange which carries significant traffic. costs get recovered. life is simple. randy
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Randy Bush wrote:
it costs to build, maintain, and manage an exchange which carries significant traffic. costs get recovered. life is simple.
What is significant traffic? What is the cost? If you have an exchange with let's say 20 people connected to it and they all connect using GE. Running this exchange in an existing facility with existing people, you can easily run it for under $10k per year per connected operator or less as you already have engineers that are on site frequently, you already have a billing department etc. It's when the exchange is being run by a separate entity that needs a marketing department, a well-paid staff of managers, technicians etc that price really goes up. All this to basically manage a simple ethernet switch that needs some patching a couple of times a month at maximum. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
What is significant traffic? What is the cost? If you have an exchange with let's say 20 people connected to it and they all connect using GE. Running this exchange in an existing facility with existing people, you can easily run it for under $10k per year per connected operator or less as you already have engineers that are on site frequently, you already have a billing department etc.
It's when the exchange is being run by a separate entity that needs a marketing department, a well-paid staff of managers, technicians etc that price really goes up. All this to basically manage a simple ethernet switch that needs some patching a couple of times a month at maximum.
no. in the first case, you're just hiding the incremental costs. eventually, some bean counter is gonna want to recover them, and then folk get quite unhappy. and, there are known issues when a colo or transit provider is the exchange. [ note that i am not talking about small local friendly exchanges. i mean stuff that carries multi-gig. it's like is-is, almost no one runs it, only the few folk who carry most of the internet's traffic. ] randy, who contributes to and peers at the seattle internet exchange
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Randy Bush wrote:
no. in the first case, you're just hiding the incremental costs. eventually, some bean counter is gonna want to recover them, and then folk get quite unhappy.
What costs are you referring to? You basically need a few hours time per month from engineers and billing department. This for an exchange that has 20 ISPs connected to it. The amount of traffic isn't really a factor, but the one I know of and am part of running carries multi-gigabit. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Randy Bush wrote:
no. in the first case, you're just hiding the incremental costs. eventually, some bean counter is gonna want to recover them, and then folk get quite unhappy.
What costs are you referring to? You basically need a few hours time per month from engineers and billing department. This for an exchange that has 20 ISPs connected to it. The amount of traffic isn't really a factor, but the one I know of and am part of running carries multi-gigabit.
Does the person that sweeps the floor do so for free? And supply the broom? -- Requiescas in pace o email Ex turpi causa non oritur actio http://members.cox.net/larrysheldon/
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr. wrote:
Does the person that sweeps the floor do so for free? And supply the broom?
The marginal cost of half a rack being occupied by an IX switch in a multi-hundred-rack facility is negiglabe. Yes, it should carry a cost of a few hundred dollars per month in "rent", and the depreciation of the equipment is also a factor, but all-in-all these costs are not high and if an IX point rakes in $200k a year that should well compensate for these costs. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Randy Bush wrote:
no. in the first case, you're just hiding the incremental costs. eventually, some bean counter is gonna want to recover them, and then folk get quite unhappy.
What costs are you referring to? You basically need a few hours time per month from engineers and billing department. This for an exchange that has 20 ISPs connected to it. The amount of traffic isn't really a factor, but the one I know of and am part of running carries multi-gigabit.
This is simply untrue. Whilst it is possible to establish an exchange with minimal cost if it is successful your costs will soon escalate. To provide carrier class service for the worlds top carriers you need to invest in the latest hardware, you need to house multiple switches and odfs in suites, you need to pay a team of engineers to run the exchange 24x7, you need to maintain vendor support agreements.
From empirical data this cost is in the order of a few million dollars per year. This may not be a lot of money compared to the annual turnover of the large carriers but eg for a typical exchange $5m between 150 companies is on average about $3k/mo each (of course this will likely be skewed so that the top few companies pay more).
If you're exchange is in an already developed location then my observation is that you need to have the above if you are to attract the larger networks which in turn brings in the traffic and noc requirements that see increasing costs. Steve
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
This is simply untrue.
Whilst it is possible to establish an exchange with minimal cost if it is successful your costs will soon escalate.
To provide carrier class service for the worlds top carriers you need to invest in the latest hardware, you need to house multiple switches and odfs in suites, you need to pay a team of engineers to run the exchange 24x7, you need to maintain vendor support agreements.
IXes are not for "top carriers", they're for the small and middle players, and in some cases for the top players to talk to smaller players. IXes is a way to cheaply exchange traffic. It's better to establish two IX switches and run them with 99.9% availability than to have a single IX switch and aim for 99.999%.
If you're exchange is in an already developed location then my observation is that you need to have the above if you are to attract the larger networks which in turn brings in the traffic and noc requirements that see increasing costs.
If you're already an operator or colo facility owner, you already have all of that, which makes the cost of running an IX much less than if you're a separate entity who have to set up all these facilities. I work in an environment where IXes are readily available in all major metropolitan areas where we are, and they don't cost an arm and a leg and fiber is cheap and readily available, so we try to establish everywhere. This brings the impact of a single IX being down to very negligable, so we definately don't need 99.999%. Off the top of my head, I'd estimate that the cost of being present at an exchange here is around $1-5k per gig per month (including router port, fiber connection and IX exchange fee). We run these at approx 50% utilisation so the price per megabit is $5-10/megabit per month. This also adds a lot of reduced latency from our customers to our competitors customers which is very appreciated, it also cuts down on long-haul costs. If an IX costs $50-100k a year for a gig it tilts the whole equation, so I can understand if a lot of people don't like them if that's the cost of being connected. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
i look forward to my next trip to sweden, where i expect many nice free lunches randy
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Randy Bush wrote:
i look forward to my next trip to sweden, where i expect many nice free lunches
If you start working in a resturant, you can probably expect that. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
i look forward to my next trip to sweden, where i expect many nice free lunches If you start working in a resturant, you can probably expect that.
but you seem to think they are served in exchange points, and not just to those that run them, but to all comers. very cool. sad to say, we're past 1999 now. out here in the free world (and those countries we bomb and/or invade[0]) folk seem to want us to pay for what we eat. bummer, eh? randy -- [0] - bumber sticker of the week "We're making enemies faster than we can kill them!"
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Randy Bush wrote:
but you seem to think they are served in exchange points, and not just to those that run them, but to all comers. very cool.
sad to say, we're past 1999 now. out here in the free world (and those countries we bomb and/or invade[0]) folk seem to want us to pay for what we eat. bummer, eh?
The weird thing is that I (and partners) have been running an IX wth 4 nodes since 2001 with the business model I have mentioned and as far as I can calculate, we have at least made break-even. At $5k a year for FE and $10k a year for GE and letting the ISP provide their own access to the IX via whatever means they have available, it's possible to run an IX if you just want to provide the IX L2 unicast service and not have a lot of other services around. We calculated that we needed three customers per PoP and we've had more than that. The initial investment in switches was approx $50k per PoP. Running L2 switches is quite simple, I don't see what all the fuss is about. If the above model doesnt work in your area, though luck for you, guess you have to pass on the added cost to your customers. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Sat, Jul 03, 2004 at 09:24:17PM +0200, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote: [snip] IXes are not for "top carriers" ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Like the economy, perhaps this is different in .se. But this is NAnog to which you are sending the message, and the above statement is incorrect. -- RSUC / GweepNet / Spunk / FnB / Usenix / SAGE
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 2004-07-03, at 18.10, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
It's when the exchange is being run by a separate entity that needs a marketing department, a well-paid staff of managers, technicians etc that price really goes up. All this to basically manage a simple ethernet switch that needs some patching a couple of times a month at maximum.
For quite some months I have spent time thinking on this particular issue. And one thing have struck me with the discussions of staffing levels. It is always true that if your day job get's payed by some other revenue generating business, running a IX with that staff should be easy. That is cross-subsidation and there is no need for recovering costs for the IXP. At the same time, there are a number of roles you can only take that far in that way. One of the most obvious ones is growing the membership number. Now, it's not always the case that an increased membership number benefits the members, but I am willing to claim that it is in most cases. Reason is simply that the cost of running the exchange is not directly proportional to the number of members. So more members means less cost per member for a non-for-profit IX. Also, more members should increase the value for the other members as they have the possibility to "peer-away" more traffic. Now, I am willing to claim that you can only get new members "by reputation" up to a certain point. After that you will need to start to actively go out and find them, and deal with them. This will cost you money. I have with great interest followed how non-for-profit IXPs in Europe have started employing "marketing" staff. I have no idea if this pays off for them, but I suspect it does. - - kurtis - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQOpDiaarNKXTPFCVEQJDGwCfXqZw3+7YFuDPNiuvUONfVYi+mYkAnj6h Ud8VxItMH8qNXqrObTY6inSK =pr29 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Sat, Jul 03, 2004 at 08:47:11AM -0700, Randy Bush wrote:
The price being charged for the public exchange ports is non-trivial Only at the (very few) commercial exchanges. The vast majority are free or of trivial expense.
by count of small 10/100 switches or by traffic volume?
it costs to build, maintain, and manage an exchange which carries significant traffic. costs get recovered. life is simple.
I tend to get suspicious when I know the exchange isn't charging enough money to cover its costs. I also don't see a need for a "free exchange" either. I'm perfectly willing to pay a fair price for the service, and I at least want the BELIEF that I am going to get a certain level of service from the exchange, not "but we can't afford..." or "duhhhhhhh?". It seems that most commercial network operators agree, as you rarely see them popping up at joe bob's local alternative new exchange point, even when it is free. The cost for the exchange hardware is really not that much. Just to throw out some numbers, you can snag a new 6509 w/SUP720 and 48-SFP GE for less than $50k with very modest discounts. Admittidly this is relatively new technology compared to most GE exchanges currently deployed, but the pricing a couple years ago was around the same for the Floundry's that everyone deployed, just at a lower density. A successful exchange probably has multiple switches and some 10GE trunks, but with a few customers paying industry average recurring fees this quickly pays for itself. The euro players are really the ones to look to for examples here, US players have been complete failures (especially with multi-site linked exchanges). The guys best positioned to do it are the actual colo operators who already have a technician staff on site, they really only need 1-2 higher level engineers, a support contract for when the switch crashes, etc. The real cost and value of an exchange point is the marketing (i.e. showing up at nanog and giving presentations about it, creating your own peering events, having sales folks promoting the product, etc), not the hardware. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)
PWG> Date: Sat, 3 Jul 2004 01:00:35 -0400 PWG> From: Patrick W Gilmore PWG> Any particular reason you would worry about public peering PWG> points these days? ANES, perhaps? Those who finally found old NANOG-L and i-a archives have decided public peering is bad. Hmmmm.... let's see.... cheap, uncongested public peering -vs- expensive private peering. Assuming fixed amount of money to spend, which buys more? There. Now we just need to wait a few more years for the "public peering is good" mentality to spread. Hopefully that will still be the case at that time. :-) PWG> There might be a concern that, for instance, a provider PWG> would show up to a NAP, connect at GigE, then peer with 2 PWG> gigabits of traffic. But I fail to see why that is the PWG> public fabric's fault, or why things would be any different PWG> on private peering. The provider knows when their *nods* Private would be worse. Even collocation + overpriced $500/mo fiber x-c compares favorably with metro OC3. You've gotta admit, though: It's funny watching someone proclaim "we avoid public peering!" when their $149/mo dedicated server lives in a PAIX suite, unbeknowst to them. :-) I guess uncongested public peering technically _is_ avoiding "congested public peering"... Eddy -- EverQuick Internet - http://www.everquick.net/ A division of Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. - http://www.brotsman.com/ Bandwidth, consulting, e-commerce, hosting, and network building Phone: +1 785 865 5885 Lawrence and [inter]national Phone: +1 316 794 8922 Wichita _________________________________________________________________ DO NOT send mail to the following addresses: davidc@brics.com -*- jfconmaapaq@intc.net -*- sam@everquick.net Sending mail to spambait addresses is a great way to get blocked.
participants (13)
-
Bill Woodcock -
Edward B. Dreger -
Joe Provo -
Kurt Erik Lindqvist -
Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr. -
Mikael Abrahamsson -
Patrick W Gilmore -
Randy Bush -
ren -
Richard A Steenbergen -
Stephen J. Wilcox -
Stewart, William C (Bill), RTSLS -
Suresh Ramasubramanian