[106764] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Coop Peering Fabric??
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andy Davidson)
Tue Aug 12 15:14:02 2008
From: Andy Davidson <andy@nosignal.org>
To: deepak@ai.net
In-Reply-To: <48A10065.4060900@ai.net>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:13:32 +0100
Cc: nanog list <nanog@merit.edu>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
On 12 Aug 2008, at 04:15, Deepak Jain wrote:
> A "coop", best-effort switch fabric colo'd at a few sites would
> allow participants to peer off traffic at a price of the order of a
> single cross-connect (~$500/month per 10G port is possible, maybe
> less)
Most of the Internet Exchanges in Europe that quickly spring to mind
as successful, are run as co-operative entities, similar to what you
describe.
Specifically, most (all?) of the larger ones over here run as
independent bodies that are owned mutually -- that is to say, owned by
all of the participators at the exchange. The model is popular, and
many hundreds of GB/s of traffic is exchanged on switches run by
mutual organisations in Europe.
This works really well because it means there is no commercial/profit
motivation to operate significantly above cost-recovery levels. Here,
costs mean the CapEx, OpEx, and any community/member sanctioned
projects.
Where it breaks is when we have to tell a network with lots of traffic
that in order to participate at the exchange, they have to become a
member (part owner) of the organisation. Due to organisational or
even regulatory issues, it may not be legal to sell services (exchange
ports) to non members/owners. This doesn't frighten the engineer
asking for a connection, but it causes some concern at C*O level
("err, I might have to declare this to shareholders/regulators...")
I think my message to you would be that if you have a bunch of
colleagues at other organisations near you that want to start
peering ... configure a switch, peer, and take it from there as you
grow ! I hope your new exchange is successful !
Best wishes
Andy Davidson
Declared hat - www.lonap.net (London, UK based mutual IX)
