AW: ams-ix - worth using?
Richard A Steenbergen
ras at e-gerbil.net
Fri Aug 25 04:39:01 UTC 2006
On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 06:56:56AM +0300, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
>
> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006, Gunther Stammwitz wrote:
>
> >Exchange / Traffic on public exchange vlan / Number of members
> >LINX: ~ 77 Gbps / 210 members
> >AMS-IX: ???* Gbps / 244 members
> >DE-CIX: 51 Gbps / 184 members
>
> I'm curious if any US based IXs exceed 100Gbps. Or has Amsterdam and
> London become the center of the Internet universe?
Not everyone publishes their traffic stats, some pseudo-publically, and
some not at all. The total for every Equinix Exchange in the US (thats
Ashburn, New York Metro, Chicago, Dallas, San Jose, and Los Angeles)
combined is currently only 93Gbps peak (a huge upsurge since they launched
a 10GE product several months back, it was at 40Gbps before that). Equinix
is pretty much the vast majority of interesting public peering in the US
today, with the closest runners-up being PAIX Palo Alto (numbers
unpublished, but speculation is around 35Gbps), followed by NYIIX
(16Gbps). It is probably safe to speculate that AMSIX is as large or
larger than all of the public peering in the US combined.
Why the difference? Well for starters, the US exchange points are
typically priced at 3-6x the equivilent sized port at LINX AMSIX DECIX
etc, so it just doesn't make economic sense for most US networks to peer
publically. Also, US exchange points are almost all run by commercial
facility operators who use the ix's to promote colocation and
crossconnects in their facilities, vs the European exchange points who are
colocation facility neutral. The US IX operators are not motivated to
promote "as many people as possible on the exchanges", since this just
means increased costs of operating the switches with no new colo and
reduced crossconnect revenue. They're satisfied with keeping the exchanges
priced at a premium, as an "entry level" point for new users and "low
speed peer aggregator" for bigger networks, and then making everyone else
use private peering.
Thus the vast majority of peering in the US happens via private
interconnection instead of via public peering. Of course this is a self
feeding cycle too, because of the low cost and ease of entry there are
hundreds of networks of every ilk peering at the European exchanges, which
means there are far more open-peering people compared to the US exchanges.
This makes it very attractive for even US based companies to get started
peering with a pseudowire to Europe, compared with going to a US exchange.
Also, not that it matters (because the absurdly high pricing has kept new
customer turnup at an absolute minimum), but most of the facilities where
the US exchange points are run from are currently "sold out", particularly
to new customers. :)
--
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
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