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

Sat Jul 3 19:37:12 UTC 2004

On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Michael Smith wrote:

> 1) 1 Rack
> 2) Space for the rack in a secure facility
> 3) AC for the equipment
> 4) Power for the equipment (including line and UPS)

This can be had for approx $300-1000 a month in my market.

> 5) Fiber and Copper runs to the facility for cross-connects
> 6) Terminations of (5)

This is carried on a per connection basis in my market.

> 7) O&M of space and gear

$50-100k over three years isn't that much.

> 8) Layer 8 and 9 negotiation of (1) through (7) to keep costs down.

I'd say that the time spent in negotiations is wasted, manpower is too 
expensive compared to the costs involved.

> Thankfully, there is some altruism on the behalf of several parties that
> allow the exchange to continue providing "zero cost" connections to
> participants.  I hardly think the cost of their time and effort is
> "marginal".

In the big picture it's marginal. Asking someone to patch a cable is a 10
minute job and the patch cable costs perhaps 30-50 dollars. Handling an
invoice for this job is a major cost in the equation so yes, altruism is
great. We gathered players that already had engineers, already had billing
departments, already had all of the above you were referring to and get
everybody to agree on a way to cooperate. The marginal costs for everybody
to establish 5 PoPs and interconnecting them was quite low and since there
are no billing being done between participants, that cuts down on
paperwork as well.

It's like a car pool. If everybody is going to bill everybody it's going
to be a big operation. If you just agree to drive every fourth day and
carry your own costs, everybody is better off.

I realise from everybody who answered that we live in different markets 
and do things differently. I just think you're making it too advanced and 
that increases cost until public IXes stop to make sense.

Keep it simple.

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