ams-ix - worth using?

Niels Bakker niels=nanog at bakker.net
Fri Aug 25 13:18:33 UTC 2006


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

AMS-IX allows the exchange of IPv4 and IPv6 traffic and doesn't mind 
whether you pay to receive certain prefixes.  At any IXP, you can only 
send traffic towards peers that actually announced the netblocks to you 
[give or take next-hop fudging that some allow and some disallow].


* patrick at ianai.net (Patrick W. Gilmore) [Fri 25 Aug 2006, 14:34 CEST]:
>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.

Excellent example on why this is not a fair comparison, as Equinix 
Ashburn is a building and AMS-IX is a collection of Ethernet switches. :-)

Given that the internal sequential numbering for fibers at NIKHEF (one 
of four housing sites with an AMS-IX switch) runs into the thousand, 
I'm willing to believe that the amount of traffic exchanged over private 
interconnects at all four locations is significant, if not way bigger 
than what's sent across the AMS-IX platform.


>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).

Thanks, Patrick.

TIE,


	-- Niels.

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