Coop Peering Fabric??

Tue Aug 12 03:37:58 UTC 2008

As a big ra-ra guy around peering, I thought this might be  
interesting, but I do not think I agree with the numbers.

On Aug 11, 2008, at 11:15 PM, Deepak Jain wrote:

> Given Cogent (and others) recent pursuit of sub $4/mb/s transit...  
> and the relatively flat cost of a "paid" peering fabric (even at  
> 10G) and the O(N) costs for cross-connects, the thought of  
> revisiting the old peering coops presented itself again.

The $4/Mbps & under prices is usually reserved for very large CIR or  
full pipe.  With a full pipe, assuming you are very, very, very good,  
you still pay $5 or more.  (I'm assuming a max of 8 Gbps on a 10G  
pipe, which seems overly optimistic IMHO.)  But that's not important  
to the discussion.

> Assuming 10G PNI model: Assuming even nominal cross-connect fees of  
> $100-$300/month per fiber pair, plus router port costs for each  
> private peer (assuming you aren't at >10% utilization on the port)  
> at a commercial exchange, you are eating a pretty significant cost  
> per megabit you are actually moving. (plug in your numbers here).  
> Assumption: Above 1Gb/s utilization, this makes sense or you are  
> counting on growth.

Define "significant"?

Taking 1 Gbps (10%), and assuming even 20K per 10G port over 2 years,  
adding in $300/month for the x-conn, you are still looking at barely  
over $1/Mbps.  If you have more than 10% utilization, that number goes  
down.  Is that significant?  Compared to what?  Transit?

I would say a 75% price reduction is pretty significant.  Plus you  
haven't considered CapEx cost for the transit ports.

> Below 10% you would normally go to a paid peering fabric where you  
> are paying cross connect + a flat port charge + router port for 1->N  
> peers and hoping that enough utilization occurs that you get >10%  
> utilization (to recover capex, opex, etc) and then whatever  
> additional utilization you need to cover the flat port charge or you  
> are counting on growth.

Here we agree.  The port fee even on european IXes is measured in  
1000s of $$ per month.  And don't get me started on US or Japanese  
ports....

> A "coop", best-effort switch fabric colo'd at a few sites would  
> allow participants to peer off traffic at a price of the order of a  
> single cross-connect (~$500/month per 10G port is possible, maybe  
> less), private-VLANs all-around, or to only-mutually approved peers  
> (e.g. via an automated web interface, prior art) to avoid many of  
> the /old/ issues. No requirement for multi-lateral peering. You  
> could peer, sell transit, buy transit, multicast, etc.
>
> The way I figure it, it removes approximately an order of magnitude  
> from the operational cost of peering with more than a handful of  
> your largest single talkers. Especially as 100G LAN Ethernet becomes  
> production before 100G WAN connections become commonplace. Economic  
> theory (assuming that worked on the Internet) suggests this would  
> allow for the increase in number of peers by approximately an order  
> of magnitude (maybe more).

Sorry, I can't get there.

First, the "largest single talkers" would not be on a shared fabric,  
they'd be on dedicated ports, so this idea doesn't help.

For the medium to small guys, I think it's a great idea.  Look at SIX,  
TorIX, PaNAP, etc.  But shaving an _order of magnitude_ off?  No, I  
don't see it.  CapEx alone is more than 10% of your cost.  (Well,  
unless you get Japanese IX ports or the most expensive US IX ports.)

Perhaps I'm lost or confused?  Can someone help me understand?

-- 
TTFN,
patrick