Exchanges that matter...

Wed Dec 4 20:40:11 UTC 1996

Danny Stroud <dannystroud at msn.com> wrote:

>What I meant was that the demand for traffic seems
>to be growing faster than technologies ability to deliver it. Even with the
>planned *new* technologies, I am predicting that there will be a point where
>the traffic of the exchange points will need to bifurcate simply to be able to
>process the load, i.e. more *smaller* exchange points all running at top
>capacity of the available technology.

There's at least one way to make IXPs to handle nearly arbitrary amount
of traffic; so this is not a fundamental problem.  It's only a matter of
time and money.  http://www.pluris.com explains how it can be done.

In other words, traffic is not the problem.  It is more economical to
have fewer high-capacity facilities instead of a zillion of lower
capacity ones.  BTW, the number of switch sites LDCs have is a lot less
than the number of their POPs, for exactly that reason.

--vadim