[72300] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: concern over public peering points [WAS: Peering point speed publicly available?]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kurt Erik Lindqvist)
Tue Jul 6 02:21:34 2004
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0407031804100.24876-100000@uplift.swm.pp.se>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
From: Kurt Erik Lindqvist <kurtis@kurtis.pp.se>
Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2004 08:15:11 +0200
To: Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
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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 -
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