concern over public peering points [WAS: Peering point speed publicly available?]

Sat Jul 3 05:00:35 UTC 2004

On Jul 2, 2004, at 9:31 PM, Stewart, William C (Bill), RTSLS wrote:
> Also, if you're dealing with ISPs that use public peering points,
> those may be a performance concern, but in the US that's mostly not 
> Tier1-Tier1.
> (Linx is a different case entirely, assuming you want your traffic to 
> be in London.)

Any particular reason you would worry about public peering points these 
days?

The FDDI MAEs are dead, there is no head of line blocking any more.  
Every ethernet or ATM switch running a NAP I've seen in the last ... 
nearly half a decade is more than capable of passing all bits going 
through it without a problem, and then some.

There might be a concern that, for instance, a provider would show up 
to a NAP, connect at GigE, then peer with 2 gigabits of traffic.  But I 
fail to see why that is the public fabric's fault, or why things would 
be any different on private peering.  The provider knows when their 
connection is congested, be it an ethernet to a NAP or an OC to another 
router.  I also have not seen that affect the packets not going to the 
congested port (unlike some older NAPs).

Public NAPs got a bad name many years ago because a few of them were 
poorly run, and some other ones had some technical difficulties, and 
some providers intentionally congested their public ports so they could 
say "see, public peering sucks", and lots of other reasons.

Today, even free NAPs pass gigabits of traffic and do it robustly.

If you have counter examples, I would be interested in seeing them.  A 
lot of traffic passes on NAPs, and I'd hate to see any of it not get to 
where it was going.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick