Airplane crashing into Atlanta-NAP

Sun Oct 27 16:44:28 UTC 1996

The talk of the Atlanta NAP is quite interesting, but nobody has addressed
the biggest issue of these "regional" IXPs.  Are the big guys going to come?
How good is the Atlanta NAP, Mae-LA, Mae-Dallas, etc. if MCI, Sprint, ANS,
UUNET, BBNPlanet and PSI don't go there?  They account for easily over 75%
of the Internet traffic.  So far, none of those guys have come to any of
the regional IXPs.  

On that note, I could care less if a plane crashes into Atlanta NAP, it
certainly isn't going to affect 99.9% of the world's Internet Traffic.  
We are wasting energy on discussing these wonderful places to house
IXPs.  Are private exchanges where it is truly at?  UUNET seems to have taken
the lead on this form of exchange..  is everyone else following?  Does
that tie into guaranteed availability?  Where does that leave the regional
IXP?  Are others willing to spend 5k-20k a month at a regional IXP if it
only offloads 1k worth of traffic?  I know we are not.    

Sorry to uplevel..  but I think this merits more discussion before the details.

Rob