Re: concern over public peering points [WAS: Peering point speed publicly available?]

[Randy Bush <randy () psg com>]

> What is significant traffic? What is the cost? If you have an exchange
> with let's say 20 people connected to it and they all connect using GE.
> Running this exchange in an existing facility with existing people, you
> can easily run it for under $10k per year per connected operator or less 
> as you already have engineers that are on site frequently, you already 
> have a billing department etc.
>
> 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.

no.  in the first case, you're just hiding the incremental costs.
eventually, some bean counter is gonna want to recover them, and
then folk get quite unhappy.

and, there are known issues when a colo or transit provider is the
exchange.

[ note that i am not talking about small local friendly exchanges.
  i mean stuff that carries multi-gig.  it's like is-is, almost no
  one runs it, only the few folk who carry most of the internet's
  traffic.  ]

randy, who contributes to and peers at the seattle internet exchange