another exchange in Cairo

Thu Feb 9 21:29:26 UTC 2006

Funny that i live in Egypt, i work in the field and i've spent the last
three days at ICT (information and comm. tech.) conference and did not hear
of that, but i'd love to see it working, our past experiences with peering
were very small and not effective,
it started with CRIX and ended with CAIX, which not all ISPs were excited
about ,

There are around 10 ISPs in egypt with their own AS number and probably 7 of
them with transit links from Flagtelecom or UUNet, the other 3 got their
links from local ISPs,

As alot of other developing countries, peering is established on personal
relationships, and even with that it doesnt work well, because both parties
couldnt agree on routing policies or even personal disliking(pathetic)

As i said most of the 10 ISPs didnt join CAIX although they are all at the
same CO(physical proximity), Ramsis CO is the main CO here,

I was involved in both IX, so i can give a brief history, i'm following this
thread and i'd love to share opinions, suggestions, in public or private, i
know there are alot of experienced people are reading this and i'd like to
get a chance to discuss this with them,

CRIX started by an ISP+Datacenter here (NTC=Egynet+ECC) at  late 2002, They
have a large Datacenter and they thought if they could bring other ISPs in,
it'd save them international bandwidth, but project died so quickly, it was
deployed by Flagtelecom, i guess no one saw benefit and no reason to pay, so
they all just didnt join and that was it,

As for CRIX (Cairo Regional Exchange Point), its a Govern. initiative and
its free, but still most ISPs didnt feel its needed because they either
thought that the local traffic is very small or that all other ISPs will
abuse their upload speed because they have a large datacenter/servers..,

We run 4xOC3 worth of Internet, we peer over CAIX with 2 other ISPs and the
traffic between the three of us is 12 Mb :) so its not much, but its free
and it costs us nothing but an ethernet port and ethernet cable.

My guess is that all the internet traffic overhere is P2P apps, being
downloaded from Asia or US.

Egypt has over 80 Million in population, 10 million owns a cell phone, half
of them with computers and half of them with internet access, so it all
boils to not more than 5-7 Gbs of total internet traffic, on the other hand
L3 VPNs has grown so much in the last two years, so there is something in
the way i believe.

On 2/9/06, Joe Abley <jabley at isc.org> wrote:
>
>
> At the risk of perpetuating a thread that arguably should have died
> some days ago, someone without a nanog-post subscription reminded me
> of GPX, who have plans to being an exchange point live in Egypt
> (amongst other places).
>
>    http://www.gpx.ie/
>
> No association, knowledge or endorsement implied, but maybe this
> information is useful to someone.
>
>
> Joe
>
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