Re: NANOG67 - Tipping point of community and sponsor bashing?

[Phil Rosenthal <pr () isprime com>]

Hello all,

I wasn't able to attend NANOG this time around, but watched Dave Temkin's presentation on youtube.

My comments are:
1) Over the past 5 years:
My cost for switch/router ports have gone down a lot.
My cost for transit has gone down a lot.
My cost for exchange ports have gone down, but not quite as fast as my transit and switch/router ports, and this does 
lead to some value questions. Dave is right to ask them.

However: exchange port fees are not my biggest enemy today. My cross connect fees have not gone down *at all*. On a 
proportion basis, cross connect fees have gone from "not mattering" to being an important part of any deployment cost 
calculation. Why aren't we raising hell about cross connect fees?

2) Exotic features -- Pvlan, L2VPN, L3VPN have absolutely no purpose on an exchange. If it could be done 'free' with 
commodity hardware, then fine -- but if it translates to requiring Big Expensive Routers instead of a cheaper but fast 
switch, this should translate to higher pricing for the customers requiring these exotic features -- not the customers 
who just want a big L2 vlan.

3) Remote peering -- This is mostly a question about distance for value.  There is a clear benefit in providing 
multi-datacenter exchanges within a metro, and both FL-IX and SIX are doing this with a very good value proposition. 
Having the ability to join DECIX Frankfurt from NYC and vice versa -- again, this is a bizarre service to be offered, 
and regular users should not be expected to pay for this. If there is a market for these services at an unsubsidized 
price, then fine -- but regular members should not be subsidizing this service.

4) sFlow -- I'm not sure why this is even really a topic. Commodity hardware does have sFlow capability, and FLIX 
demonstrates this well. With that said, for us, it is of extremely limited value. We might check these graphs to 
validate measurements of our internal netflow/sflow graphing systems, but generally, I look at the graphs generated by 
my exchange vendors less than once per year per exchange. I am honestly not even sure if SIX offers this service, as I 
never had a reason to check.

5) Marketting vs Outreach: These things are honestly basically the same thing, mostly separated by the question of "is 
it good marketing or not". I like having more members at the exchanges I am a member of. If it translates to an 
additional 3% per year to have an additional 5% of traffic to new members, I am fine with this.  If it translates to an 
extra 50% of cost for 5% of additional traffic, I am not fine with it.

Finally -- there is nothing wrong with asking questions. If you are an exchange company and you can defend your prices 
for what you offer, then there is no problem.  If you are an exchange and are mostly just hoping nobody asks the 
questions because you won't have any good answers -- well, I think this is exactly why Dave asked the question.

Best Regards,
-Phil Rosenthal
> On Jun 16, 2016, at 1:58 PM, Adam Rothschild <asr () latency net> wrote:
>
> I think a fresh conversation is needed around what makes up a
> "minimally viable" feature set for an IXP:
>
> The days of an IXP "needing" to engineer and support a multi-tenant
> sFlow portal, because the only other option is shelling out the big
> bucks for Arbor, have long passed -- overlooking the plethora of open
> sourced tools, folk like Kentik have broken into that market with
> rationally priced commercial alternatives.  Likewise, one might argue
> that offering layer-2 and layer-3 (!) VPNs is at best non-essential,
> and a distraction that fuels purchasing very expensive hardware, and
> at worse competitive with customers.
>
> On the other hand, building out a metro topology to cover all relevant
> carrier hotels, with reasonable path diversity, is absolutely table
> stakes.  And outreach is a great function, *when* it nets unique new
> participants.  To cite a recent example, the various R&E networks and
> smaller broadband and mobile providers showing up here in the US, due
> to excellent efforts by the NYIIX and DE-CIX teams.
>
> At the end of the day, IXP peering must be significantly cheaper than
> transit alternatives, many of which are priced based on utilization
> (as opposed to port capacity).  We can dance around this point all we
> want, but absent a change in trajectory, I worry some IXPs will
> ultimately price themselves out of the market, and all the gold-plated
> features in the world won't satiate those making purchasing decisions.
>
> $0.02,
> -a
>
> On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 11:17 AM, Niels Bakker <niels=nanog () bakker net> wrote:
> > * zbynek () dialtelecom cz (Zbyněk Pospíchal) [Thu 16 Jun 2016, 14:23 CEST]:
> > > Dne 15.06.16 v 20:10 Mikael Abrahamsson napsal(a):
> > >
> > > > Well, the customers also wanted more functions and features. They wanted
> > > > sFLOW statistics to show traffic, customer portals, better SLAs, distributed
> > > > IXes, remote peering, more hand-holding when connecting etc.
> > >
> > >
> > > Are you sure they still want them if they have to pay for these features
> > > separately?
> > >
> > > Currently, such luxury functions are increasing costs also for networks
> > > who don't need/want it.
> >
> >
> > sFlow statistics isn't a luxury function.  Neither is remote peering.  The
> > others Mikael mentioned are debatable at worst but you'd be telling the
> > membership what they really want rather than listening to them saying what
> > they want.
> >
> > This thread is full of people who have never run large L2 networks stating
> > their opinions on running large L2 networks, and they invariably
> > underestimate their complexity and the logistics required.
> >
> >
> >        -- Niels.