NANOG67 - Tipping point of community and sponsor bashing?

Sat Jun 18 03:57:09 UTC 2016

As I write this I'm sitting about 100 feet away (vertically) from the
Westin fiber MMR, so you can definitely say that I'm biased in favor of the
Westin and the SIX approach of doing things.

What Randy just wrote is exactly the point I was trying to make in my last
email. Some real estate facility owners/managers have got into the mistaken
mindset that they can get the greatest value and the most monthly revenue
from the square-footage of their building by charging additional MRC XC
fees to the tenants of the building.

When in fact the opposite is true, and we need a concerted community effort
to lobby every IX real estate owner with this fact: Your real estate will
be MORE valuable and will attract a greater critical mass of carriers,
eyeball networks, CDNs, huge hosting providers/colo/VM, etc if you make the
crossconnects free. There is a reason why Amazon's HQ was built right
across the street, and one of them is the the ridiculously high density of
carriers in the Westin. They even removed two whole elevators, which is
possible now due to much lower persons/hour elevator traffic and filled the
elevator shafts with riser and cooling.

Not just North American carriers are here, but every noteworthy Asian
network that has capacity in the WA and OR landed submarine cables. And
it's the endpoint to the longhaul DWDM/submarine capacity into all the
non-satellite-dependent communities in Alaska - so logically a lot of
Alaska actually looks like it could be a distant suburb of Seattle, network
topology wise.

The Westin does still have a *few* office space vacancies, but not much in
colo space. Based on my observations over the past 12-14 years they have
slowly been reclaiming the office space by not renewing peoples' office
space leases and converting the space to modern hot aisle/cold aisle
enclosed cabinet space (as on the 4th floor), or conditioned cage space.

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 4:27 PM, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:

> >> Cross connects are our industry's $100 gold plated HDMI cables.
> >
> > In the US maybe.  Cross-connect prices are much more reasonable in
> > Europe (€0 - €50/month).
> >
> > Personally, I don't have a problem with MRCs when ordering
> > cross-connects: data centres are expensive to build and run.  But
> > yeah, $300/m is nuts and that price point has zero relationship to the
> > cost of delivery of the service.
>
> [ i know you know this, but i hope you do not mind being a soapbox ]
>
> back in the day, the seattle westin building (not the hotel, but a 33
> story office building next door) had a smart manager.  he had a riser
> shaft built out and set a very low nrc/mrc for copper and fiber.  given
> the building's copper mmr (meet me room) and a fiber mmr, colos
> exploded, and now the building is mostly racks, vying for being the
> largest carrier hotel in the left coast.  the six was built and expanded
> rapidly in this fertile environment.
>
> no, the westin is not making millions off of cross-connects, but they
> do not have rental vacancies.
>
> due to the shortage, and maybe price (dunno), of westin space, the six
> has been extended to a few other buildings; see diagram at bottom of
> https://www.seattleix.net/topology.  this makes sense to me.  extensions
> to distant cities make less sense to me; but i am an old fogey.
>
> randy
>