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unpublished, but speculation is around 35Gbps), followed by NYIIX 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
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)



More information about the NANOG mailing list