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

Sat Jul 3 16:02:21 UTC 2004

On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, ren wrote:

> 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, 

I agree with you 100%. Working at a nordic european operator being present
at LINX, AMSIX and all the northern europe exchanges my reasoning is this:

With IXes you buy one highspeed interface and get lots of peers and you 
can peer with people you might only exchange a few megabit/s with. Buying 
loads and loads of OC3s, T3s, OC12 to peer with and purchasing fiber 
patching to interconnect these just doesnt make sense when you can buy a 
GE or 10GE interface and get tens or hundreds of peers on that single 
interface without re-patching or establishing any new fiber connections.

We have a very liberal peering policy which makes peering a pure 
operational decision, being handled by the line organisation. Each peering 
takes approx 5-10 minutes of someones time and that's it. No meetings of 
peering coordinators or alike, so those people are freed up to do better 
things.

In a lot of the european exchanges all graphs of all ports on the IX is 
available to you as a member (or even publically available). If someone 
runs their port full, you probably know about it.

Playing the peering game and trying to increase cost for someone else 
means you increase your own cost as well. Is that worth it? You have to be 
pretty big to justify it...

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se