interconnection costs

Thu Dec 24 00:39:11 UTC 2015

Aren't availability, guaranteed service and remote hands an incentive to do
peering inside a third party colocation?

I see very large numbers for xconnects for instance in Equnix [
https://blog.equinix.com/2013/08/equinix-cross-connects-hit-110000/] and it
made me believe buying xconnect is still a normal practice.

Best Regards
Reza Motamedi (R.M)
Graduate Research Fellow
Oregon Network Research Group
Computer and Information Science
University of Oregon

On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 2:12 PM, Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On 23 December 2015 at 20:05, Reza Motamedi <motamedi at cs.uoregon.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> In Private peering however the AS pays the colo provider for the xconnect
>> per ASes that it wants to peer with. The cost of transit would be
>> additional if the peering is in fact a transit and not settlement free.
>>
>
> You are still assuming there is a colo. But perhaps the most common case
> is a multihomed company buying transit from two independent service
> providers. The customer is at his office and the two service providers will
> have their end somewhere in the city, perhaps even terminating their end of
> the circuit in a street cabinet. The customer is multihomed and therefore
> has his own AS. This is a peering situation with three AS numbers that fits
> your description, it is private peering and there is no xconnect. Instead
> there is usually a leased line cost, but this cost is often hidden from the
> customer. Also the ISP might own the line (physical fiber) and the cost is
> not a simple $/month.
>
> But also two ISPs might peer in this way. Residual internet providers have
> a ton of points of presences, so why choose a place where there is a
> xconnect fee? We can peer anywhere in the city, including at a random
> street cabinet. Often the cost of renting a dark fiber somewhere is lower
> than a xconnect fee (a sign that datacenter owners are too greedy).
>
> If one party is a content provider I give you that the peering point is
> usually at a datacenter somewhere. But still, if the content provider is
> big enough to run their own datacenter, we are back at the leased line case
> again. Some content providers, even if small, prefer to just run their own
> datacenter in the basement of their offices.
>
> Regards,
>
> Baldur
>
>