AW: ams-ix - worth using?

Patrick W. Gilmore patrick at ianai.net
Fri Aug 25 12:33:23 UTC 2006


On Aug 25, 2006, at 8:10 AM, Gunther Stammwitz wrote:

>> Without getting in the middle of the eternal contest over who
>> is better, LINX or AMS-IX (each has its own advantages and
>> disadvantages), the AMS-IX website says 165Gbps, the LINX
>> website says 95Gbps (actual publicly switched traffic), and
>> the DECIX website says 71Gbps. Some portion of the AMS-IX
>> traffic seems to be Dutch-specific content that stays in the
>> country, but there is plenty of global traffic there too.
>
> I've just been in touch with a colleague of mine and he has to add the
> following:
> "Hey a biased analysis,
> IIRC AMS-IX allows all kind of traffic including upstream, not only  
> peering
> traffic. DE-CIX is peering only. I assume the CIXes in US behave  
> similar.
> Besides that, I wonder what kind of hardware will they be using in the
> future, assuming they grow like all other CIXes...."

There is no "fair" stat, since you cannot quantify an IX into a  
single dimension.

Equinix Ashburn almost certainly carries more traffic through the  
building than AMS-IX carries, probably by many times, but that stat  
is not published as most of the traffic is over PI.

The AMS-IX member list includes people hooking up for VoIP peering  
and other things at Kbps instead of Mbps or Gbps.

There is a building in Seoul, South Korea, which some claim passes  
multiple terabits per second over private peering.  (Honestly, I  
don't believe that number, but it's been claimed.)

Etc., etc.

The numbers mean what the numbers mean.  AMS-IX has more traffic  
flowing over their public switch infrastructure than any other public  
exchange in the world.  This means only and exactly that AMS-IX has  
more traffic flowing over their public switch infrastructure than any  
other public exchange in the world - nothing more, nothing less.

If you base your buying / peering requirements on one dimension of an  
n-dimensional decision matrix, you are probably not choosing optimally.


All that said, AMS-IX is an outstanding IX.  A network with  
significant European traffic is almost certain to find peering at   
AMS-IX beneficial.  But the same is true for other exchanges (e.g.  
LINX).

-- 
TTFN,
patrick



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