Info on MAE-EAST
Paul A Vixie
paul at vix.com
Thu Jan 16 05:45:29 UTC 1997
Brett writes:
> MAE-Houston, a small NAP in the scheme of things, but it makes for a good
> example so we'll use it. $2000/month to get your foot in the door, then
> another large chunk of cash to connect to the Gigaswitch which all things
> considered, isn't really needed. Rather than waste their money on equipment
> that all in all just doesn't need to be there, why not make it more economic
> for local players to get involved and cross connect to eachother. In the end
> you not only save money by not bringing in useless hardware but you garner
> more customers by lessening the price of the private interconnect.
Hmmm. According to what I learnt in school, the cost of a connected network
like a GIGAswitch or Catalyst or DELNI with N participants is:
(N x interface_cost) + (N x port_cost)
...while the cost of a connected network made up of wire peers is:
(2 x sum(N - 1) x interface_cost)
"sum(N-1)" is an interesting function. Here are some examples:
% calc
> define sum(n) = n > 0 ? n + sum(n-1) : 0;
"sum" defined
> for (n = 2; n < 20; n++) print n,2*sum(n-1);
2 2
3 6
4 12
5 20
6 30
7 42
8 56
9 72
10 90
11 110
12 132
13 156
14 182
15 210
16 240
17 272
18 306
19 342
That means with 19 ISP's in a GIGAswitch-free room, there are 342 FIP's at
a cost of, what, US$12000 each after discount? I'll betcha I can buy quite
a few GIGAswitches for US$4.1M. Oops, that's not a fair comparison, since
with a GIGAswitch I also need 19 FIP's. Figure that a fully configured
GIGAswitch retails without discount for US$80K and that 19 FIPs are going
to run another US$228K. That's still a *lot* less than 2*sum(n-1).
This also assumes that we all have VIP2 cards and want to burn 9 7513 slots
just on local peering, and it further assumes that a 7513 won't just simply
melt if all the interfaces ever get hot at the same time.
The breakeven is between N=3 and N=4. On the Internet, N never stays small.
(And that breakeven assumes that the 4 people have to buy the whole
GIGAswitch with noone like MFS to underwrite the costs of the unused ports;
that means four people in a room together could SAVE MONEY buying the GIGA-
switch.)
Gah.
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