NANOG67 - Tipping point of community and sponsor bashing?

Fri Jun 17 13:58:12 UTC 2016

> It moves the monopoly to the IXP operator!

I disagree, if there is only one *MAIN* building that an IXP is in then participants are going to have to go to that building, giving the colo provider the monopoly, which affects not just cross connects towards and IXP, but other participants too, that you might want to connect directly to.

Yes, if the IXP is distributed across more than one building then you have choice as to where you (and other people) put their equipment, so you may have to go to another building to connect to certain peers. Sadly nobody lives in a perfect world, so IMO having the IXP distributed across multiple buildings is better as you can connect to all those who are in your building directly, and peer with the rest over the distributed IXP.

Regards,
Marty Strong
--------------------------------------
CloudFlare - AS13335
Network Engineer
marty at cloudflare.com
+44 7584 906 055
smartflare (Skype)

http://www.peeringdb.com/view.php?asn=13335

> On 17 Jun 2016, at 14:48, Leo Bicknell <bicknell at ufp.org> wrote:
> 
> In a message written on Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 05:56:36PM +0100, Will Hargrave wrote:
>> Most of the major IXs in the European market operate in multiple 
>> datacentres. Why? Because it decreases the monopoly conferred upon one 
>> particular datacentre in a market which becomes the ‘go to’ 
>> location.
> 
> It moves the monopoly to the IXP operator!
> 
> When everyone is in one facility (or at least building) it is
> typically easy to get low priced (although maybe not low enough,
> see other posts in this thread) cross connects.  It's common to see
> a pair of public peers fill up a significant part of their port,
> and then move to a private peering model getting off the IXP and
> onto glass directly.
> 
> When the IXP is distributed, this becomes glass between buildings,
> often requiring yet another supplier as well.  The MRCs are higher
> making the justification to move off harder.  What happens is rather
> than moving off to glass, they have to buy faster/more ports from
> the IXP and move the traffic over the IXP.
> 
> The IXP becomes the go-to monopoly as a result.
> 
> Now, perhaps IXP's are more benevolent than data center opertors,
> and this is a good trade.  I think one thing the presentation was
> asking people to do was step back, look at the situation, and
> reevaluate that particular tradeoff.
> 
> -- 
> Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org
> PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/