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

Sat Jul 3 10:41:12 UTC 2004

On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

> b) The price being charged for the public exchange ports is non-trivial
>    (especially compared to the cost of transit these days!), and is billed 
>    on a port basis instead of a usage basis (at least in the US). Since 
>    public peering is treated as a "necessary evil", with traffic moved to 
>    much more economical private peers when they start getting full, no one 
>    wants to provision extra capacity ahead of demand (in fact, in the US 
>    it is exceedingly rare to see anyone with 2 ports on a single public 
>    exchange).

This is counter intuitive to me altho perhaps I need to better understand the IX 
operators income model.

If I were a colo company who also operated an IX I'd want to encourage people to 
use my IX and put as much traffic over it. The logic being that operators 
gravitate towards these high bandwidth exchange areas and that means new 
business. The encouragement here would be to make the IX cost quite small.. of 
course the other benefit of succeeding in getting a lot of operators and traffic 
on your IX is you can publicise the data to show why you're better (or as good 
as) your competitors..

This doesnt affect their income from colo, support, cross connects so why not do 
it?

Steve