[46929] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Links between cabinets at commercial datacentre
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Adam Herscher)
Wed Apr 17 19:27:45 2002
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2002 16:27:10 -0700 (PDT)
From: Adam Herscher <adam@xtime.com>
To: Paul Vixie <vixie@vix.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <45772BAD0AD07145A9D8E522C6F051010193E869@axis.pacc.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.10.10204171604190.3528-100000@sundev1>
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Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On 17 Apr 2002, Paul Vixie wrote:
> someone like exodus or qwest or at&t or uunet or abovenet would be very
> likely to prevent their customers from directly cross-connecting.
> mae-west (55 s market) won't allow it either. paix, equinix, switch and
> data, and other "neutral colos" won't allow it to occur without a fee
> but the fees are reasonable (unlike, say, the cross connect fees at
> mae-west.)
UUNet's never put up any roadblocks for me in crossconnecting between
cabinets in their datacenters (2 cabinets belonging to different UUNet
customers). They've done it quickly too -- here's the response from a
UUNet engineer from the last time I asked:
> > If this is NOT an Out-of-Band cross connect (POTS, ISDN, whatever)
> > contacting your sales person will not be necessary. Are you simply
> > attempting to join cabinets [X] and [Y] via a Cat5 connection??? If
> > this is the case let me know what ports in the patch panels you want
> > the cross connect terminated to and I can send the request to have
> > this done today.
Their quote for bringing in outside bandwidth (having a circuit punched
down at the datacenter + crossconnected to a cabinet) was relatively
little too -- something to the tune of $50/month iirc.
At my request, they even allowed me to have a circuit run directly
through their datacenter bypassing their equipment altogether. I flipped
the bill for the UUNet-contracted outside vendor to do the cabling.
From what I've heard, Exodus is a bit more hell-bent on forcing customers
to use Exodus (err cw) bandwidth, but even they obviously make exceptions
for their larger customers (and perhaps those that threaten to walk?).
> there's no answer to the question, as posed. "can you be more specific?"
>
I think the poster was inquiring as to common practice.
ISPs will do whatever they can to make a buck. In some cases this could
be forcing customers to use their own bandwidth by preventing
crossconnecting within their datacenter. In other cases, it could be
realizing that some customers require/value/will pay for such services.
In cases where there is little or no competition, it certainly seems like
the former would be more profitable (however disappointing).
Regards,
Adam
