(possible Flame bait) Backbone Building vs Transit purchasing

Joe Provo nanog-post at rsuc.gweep.net
Mon Mar 24 16:01:39 UTC 2003


On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 04:58:44PM -0500, Deepak Jain wrote:
[snip]
> *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?
> 
> I was in a discussion about this fairly recently, and I can imagine a 
> number of people have started asking the same questions.

Some of us have done and continue to do such large-scale operational/
financial analysis on a recurring basis. The analysis is wildly different
for different networks. If you have services offered in $large_footprint,
there are compelling reasons to stitch all the service islands together
[if you have trouble with this, ask any LEC, multi-market MSO, etc]. 

Peering withing $large_footprint should be considered a no-brainer.
Building outside your footprint is always an interesting question; 
even if you have at least one major peering point within your footprint, 
you may need to visit one or two others outside your footprint to meet
'site diversity' and multi-point requirements.

In a nutshell, peering is as useful as you make it a stretegic part of 
your business plan. Which means simplified equations for the cost/benefit
analysis will almost always be wrong.  Given your second reductive
statement ignoring differing quality levels or potential peers and 
service providers, I don't think it is worth delving deeper. Bluntly,
there is no commodity apples-to-apples value to 'transit'. The circuit-
switched bean counters may not yet see the different between long 
distance voice providers and IP transit providers, but I would expect 
more from this community.

Cheers,

Joe 




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