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

[Richard A Steenbergen <ras () e-gerbil net>]

On Sat, Jul 03, 2004 at 08:28:50AM -0400, ren wrote:
> At 02:07 AM 7/3/2004 -0400, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
> > b) The price being charged for the public exchange ports is non-trivial
> >   (especially compared to the cost of transit these days!), and is billed
> >   on a port basis instead of a usage basis (at least in the US). Since
> >   public peering is treated as a "necessary evil", with traffic moved to
> >   much more economical private peers when they start getting full, no one
> >   wants to provision extra capacity ahead of demand (in fact, in the US
> >   it is exceedingly rare to see anyone with 2 ports on a single public
> >   exchange).
>
> <hi ras!>  As one of the folks who gets questioned by Sales all the time 
> about the reasons behind the multiple shared fabric ports at the IXs I'll 
> gladly explain why we have 14 in the US at present and are preparing for 
> ~5-10 abroad.

You're definitely one of the rare few, especially given your size. In
Europe it seems far more common for people to provision multiple ports and
make certain they have capacity. In the US, even the couple of other folks
I can think of who actually decided to provision multiple ports on the
"modern exchanges" we're thinking of ended up sitting with congestion for
some number of weeks before they actually did it. The general line of
thinking here is "ok exchange port is getting full, lets move someone big
to a PNI". Are there even any exchange points in the US who are actually
doing 10GE right now (major and production, not someone tinkering)?

One way or another, there is definitely room for improvement in the
technology of public peering. Then again, with some classic exchanges
(that are still considered viable, aka not mae's, aads, pbnap, etc) still
charging the same prices they were back in 1999, aka more than transit,
perhaps there is room for improvement in the financial model as well. :)

> 5. Costs.  Private peering is expensive, don't let anyone fool you.  There 
> is a resource investment in human terms that is rarely calculated properly, 
> all the way from planning of inventory to planning for capacity augments 
> after the physical install.  It is often difficult to capture the cost to 
> roll all those fibers that are improperly installed.  This I'm sure you are 
> painfully aware of <G>.

*grumble* Indeed. The one redeeming quality of your favorite overpriced 
colo and mine is that when they go to hook up a crossconnect they extend 
it all the way to the gear without a dozen more tickets, they manage to 
hook it up correctly the first time, without 1-2 hours of handholding or 
playing "find the port", and without the need to dispatch techs or pay for 
half an hour of remote hands to roll the damn fibers. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras () e-gerbil net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)