[91962] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: AW: ams-ix - worth using?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Patrick W. Gilmore)
Fri Aug 25 08:34:02 2006
In-Reply-To: <20060825120503.807F4330070@server.edu-search.de>
Cc: "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net>
From: "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net>
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2006 08:33:23 -0400
To: nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Aug 25, 2006, at 8:10 AM, Gunther Stammwitz wrote:
>> Without getting in the middle of the eternal contest over who
>> is better, LINX or AMS-IX (each has its own advantages and
>> disadvantages), the AMS-IX website says 165Gbps, the LINX
>> website says 95Gbps (actual publicly switched traffic), and
>> the DECIX website says 71Gbps. Some portion of the AMS-IX
>> traffic seems to be Dutch-specific content that stays in the
>> country, but there is plenty of global traffic there too.
>
> I've just been in touch with a colleague of mine and he has to add the
> following:
> "Hey a biased analysis,
> IIRC AMS-IX allows all kind of traffic including upstream, not only
> peering
> traffic. DE-CIX is peering only. I assume the CIXes in US behave
> similar.
> Besides that, I wonder what kind of hardware will they be using in the
> future, assuming they grow like all other CIXes...."
There is no "fair" stat, since you cannot quantify an IX into a
single dimension.
Equinix Ashburn almost certainly carries more traffic through the
building than AMS-IX carries, probably by many times, but that stat
is not published as most of the traffic is over PI.
The AMS-IX member list includes people hooking up for VoIP peering
and other things at Kbps instead of Mbps or Gbps.
There is a building in Seoul, South Korea, which some claim passes
multiple terabits per second over private peering. (Honestly, I
don't believe that number, but it's been claimed.)
Etc., etc.
The numbers mean what the numbers mean. AMS-IX has more traffic
flowing over their public switch infrastructure than any other public
exchange in the world. This means only and exactly that AMS-IX has
more traffic flowing over their public switch infrastructure than any
other public exchange in the world - nothing more, nothing less.
If you base your buying / peering requirements on one dimension of an
n-dimensional decision matrix, you are probably not choosing optimally.
All that said, AMS-IX is an outstanding IX. A network with
significant European traffic is almost certain to find peering at
AMS-IX beneficial. But the same is true for other exchanges (e.g.
LINX).
--
TTFN,
patrick
