Coop Peering Fabric??

Tue Aug 12 04:51:11 UTC 2008

Bill Woodcock wrote:
>       On Mon, 11 Aug 2008, Deepak Jain wrote:
>     > 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),
> 
> $0/month per 10G port is common enough.  
> 
> https://www.seattleix.net/faq.htm
> 
> Why pay someone else to let you use an Ethernet switch?  Presumably if 
> you can configure BGP, plugging into an Ethernet switch is well within 
> your core competency.
> 

The only point of a fee would be to provide better than 
"when-we-get-around-to-it" support. Obviously there are ways to achieve 
this without a fee. There are other benefits too [like the ability to 
have a real non-profit structure, insurances, and others to address the 
inevitable subpoena, wire-tapping request, CNN reporter, etc].

The economization of cross-connects (a large percentage of a certain 
colo provider's gross revenues and profit growth) does NOT occur when 
each provider sets up its own L2 switch for its peers to connect to -- 
unless they can peer with each other over that switch too. Which brings 
you back to a coop.

Deepak