Coop Peering Fabric??

Tue Aug 12 07:37:15 UTC 2008

Deepak,

If it were as easy as you make it sound, I can assure you people would
be doing it.

Also, does your Equinix MSA contain a non-compete clause, which could
be interpreted to mean you can't run a competing IX (metro fabric,
exchange, whatever) out of their facilities?  I hear many do.

Drive Slow,
PAUL WALL

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 11:15 PM, Deepak Jain <deepak at ai.net> wrote:
> Warning: This may actually be operational too.
>
> Given Cogent (and others) recent pursuit of sub $4/mb/s transit... and the
> relatively flat cost of a "paid" peering fabric (even at 10G) and the O(N)
> costs for cross-connects, the thought of revisiting the old peering coops
> presented itself again.
>
> Assuming 10G PNI model: Assuming even nominal cross-connect fees of
> $100-$300/month per fiber pair, plus router port costs for each private peer
> (assuming you aren't at >10% utilization on the port) at a commercial
> exchange, you are eating a pretty significant cost per megabit you are
> actually moving. (plug in your numbers here). Assumption: Above 1Gb/s
> utilization, this makes sense or you are counting on growth.
>
> Below 10% you would normally go to a paid peering fabric where you are
> paying cross connect + a flat port charge + router port for 1->N peers and
> hoping that enough utilization occurs that you get >10% utilization (to
> recover capex, opex, etc) and then whatever additional utilization you need
> to cover the flat port charge or you are counting on growth.
>
> A "coop", best-effort switch fabric colo'd at a few sites would allow
> participants to peer off traffic at a price of the order of a single
> cross-connect (~$500/month per 10G port is possible, maybe less),
> private-VLANs all-around, or to only-mutually approved peers (e.g. via an
> automated web interface, prior art) to avoid many of the /old/ issues. No
> requirement for multi-lateral peering. You could peer, sell transit, buy
> transit, multicast, etc.
>
> The way I figure it, it removes approximately an order of magnitude from the
> operational cost of peering with more than a handful of your largest single
> talkers. Especially as 100G LAN Ethernet becomes production before 100G WAN
> connections become commonplace. Economic theory (assuming that worked on the
> Internet) suggests this would allow for the increase in number of peers by
> approximately an order of magnitude (maybe more).
>
> Does this actually improve the present-day "rationale" to peer, or are most
> operations' costs so far above (from long haul, etc) or so far below (since
> the cost of transit has dropped so much) that this is no longer a relevant
> part of the equation?
>
> Warning: This may actually be operational too.
>
> Deepak Jain
> AiNET
>
>