(possible Flame bait) Backbone Building vs Transit purchasing

Stephen J. Wilcox steve at telecomplete.co.uk
Fri Mar 21 22:50:59 UTC 2003



On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Deepak Jain wrote:

> Notice, I didn't call this Peering vs Transit. I don't want to get into that
> discussion. :)

Admit it your a troll at heart ;)
 
> *IS* there a common sense number or an equation (better) anyone has worked
> out to figure whether building a backbone (national/international) to
> peering points (i.e. extending an existing, operational service network) to
> improve/add peering vs continuing to buy transit?

If you are assuming that this is not about performance then surely this is a 
very simple thing to work out?

Cost of transit T = cost of transit/committed Mbs
Cost of peering P = (cost of: circuits+routers+colo+nap)/Mbs of actual traffic

If P>T go and push your network out to the peering point it will save you money. 

Now.. at present your problem is that T is very low, and certainly lower than P 
unless you are moving quite a lot of traffic.. 1Gb is a lot of traffic, so all 
you need to do is to figure out the costs in getting to a NAP and how much 
traffic you can shift.

A common mistake I see here tho is people calculate their peering cost as a 
function of capacity, and you need to base it on real traffic, thats to say if 
you plug a GigE port into an exchange at $1000/month and then only shift 2Mb 
your cost is $500/Mb - seem obvious? Well people still keep working this out on 
capacity not reality, unless you can fill that capacity quickly you need to be 
realistic!

The other oversight is your transit is likely to be a fixed term based 
commitment, ie you have committed 100Mb over 12 months. Offloading 50mb of that 
traffic as peering in month 3 will only increase your costs as you end up paying 
for unused bandwidth.

Steve


> 
> I was in a discussion about this fairly recently, and I can imagine a number
> of people have started asking the same questions.
> 
> To be fair, and hopefully eliminate any religious issues. Let's assume 1)
> The network-in-question's traffic is balanced [1:1 push/pull] -- I know, we
> are talking theoretical here. 2) That "transit" implies a few good networks,
> with redundancy and fault-tolerance. More specifically, it is not assumed
> that "peering" or "transit" has any net-effect on the customer base because
> 1) if peering is insufficient, some transit will remain, and 2) if some
> transit provider is behaving poorly, there is another transit provider
> available to shift traffic to.
> 
> I hope this is a reasonable groundwork for a discussion. :) If you want to
> shoot out numbers (privately) I am fine with that. Let's start the bidding
> at 1Gb/s sustained. :)
> 
> Deepak Jain
> AiNET
> 
> 




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