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

Sat Jul 3 12:28:50 UTC 2004

At 02:07 AM 7/3/2004 -0400, 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).

<hi ras!>  As one of the folks who gets questioned by Sales all the time 
about the reasons behind the multiple shared fabric ports at the IXs I'll 
gladly explain why we have 14 in the US at present and are preparing for 
~5-10 abroad.

1. Trials.  There are some networks who are not ready to properly manage 
private peering, they should be but they are not.  A 90-day 'try before you 
buy' helps reduce the nickel & diming to a budget that remote hands and 
inventory adjustments chew.  IMHO, if they do not have their operations 
activities in order they should not be a peer and that is one of the 
criteria we verify.

2. PNI sizing. Some networks really don't know how much traffic they will 
have to other networks when adding peering relations.  If they argue about 
sizing it is best to drop them on to shared fabrics first to confirm with 
visuals what is flowing.

3. PNIs do not guarantee congestion avoidance.  Unfortunately private 
peering does not remove congestion with some networks, it just shifts 
it.  The peering relations community is well networked with each other.  We 
know which network offenders have capacity issues regardless of public or 
private options.

4. International peers.  Rarely are two network foot prints or goals for 
business the same.  I would rather make available the unique international 
routes to our customers than miss that opportunity by being a public 
peering snob.  This also allows the view towards new markets which rely 
heavily on shared fabrics.  While not customary in the US, many EU peering 
IXs are multiple interconnected buildings managed by a single IX vendor at 
the shared fabric layer.  Connecting to the shared fabric is an easy way to 
reach those networks in various buildings without dark fiber complexities.

5. Costs.  Private peering is expensive, don't let anyone fool you.  There 
is a resource investment in human terms that is rarely calculated properly, 
all the way from planning of inventory to planning for capacity augments 
after the physical install.  It is often difficult to capture the cost to 
roll all those fibers that are improperly installed.  This I'm sure you are 
painfully aware of <G>.

6. Management. Set a range of expectations on levels for monitoring, 
hardware, power, staff time, and capacity upgrade paths by designating some 
peers in a 'group' vs. monitoring all as individuals.

I encourage authors of RFPs to stop placing such an unnecessary stigma on 
public peering.  Those networks without the benefit of options for 
interconnecting should be penalized for failure to evolve.   Quite likely 
they are not connected to the growing sources in the current peering 
game.  What is this called... the bagel syndrome? -ren