[50802] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Do ATM-based Exchange Points make sense anymore?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William B. Norton)
Fri Aug 9 16:50:59 2002
Date: Fri, 09 Aug 2002 13:42:02 -0700
To: Nenad Trifunovic <nenad.trifunovic@wcom.com>
From: "William B. Norton" <wbn@equinix.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <0H0L0014XEAUX3@dgismtp06.wcomnet.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
>Can you, please, explain why you didn't consider Frame Relay
>based exchange in your analysis?
I don't have much insight into Frame Relay-based Internet Exchange Points ;-)
The majority of IXes around the world are ethernet-based, with some legacy
FDDI and a few ATM IXes. It is in these areas that I have done the most
data collection. The same analysis could be applied to peering across WANs
and MANs as compared with buying transit though. It might be interesting
provided I can get some market prices for transport and ports.
Why look at ATM? Right now almost everyone I am speaking with is seeing
massive drops in transit and transport prices, even below the points I
quoted, but with no comparable price drop in ATM ports or transport into an
ATM cloud. These forces lead to a point where a connection to an ATM IX
makes no sense (from a strictly financial standpoint). I have another 10
folks to walk through the paper to make sure I'm not missing anything in
the analysis, and I'll post to the list when the paper is available. If you
are interested I'd love to walk you through it to get your take.
One point a couple other folks brought up during the review (paraphrasing)
"You can't talk about a 20% ATM cell tax on the ATM-based IX side without
counting the HDLC Framing Overhead (4%) for the OC-x circuit into an
ethernet-based IX." Since the "Effective Peering Bandwidth" is the max
peering that can be done across the peering infrastructure, this is a good
point and has now been factored into the model and analysis.
Bill
