Alaska IXP?

Thu Mar 4 14:33:39 UTC 2010

On Mar 4, 2010, at 8:13 AM, Sean Donelan wrote:

> On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Antonio Querubin wrote:
>> On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Sean Donelan wrote:
>> 
>>> Are there any common locations in Alaska where multiple local ISPs exchange traffic, either transit or peering?  Or is Seattle the closest exchange point for Alaska ISPs?
>> 
>> peeringdb.com lists only SIX (in Seattle) and PAIX Seattle.
> 
> Thanks and also thanks to the other folks that replied privately.  That matches basically what I had found, but I wanted to check.
> 
> Transit is also ok, I'm doing the usual minimum connections/maximum communications in case of (earthquake, volcano, tsunomi, etc) math.  Is
> there someplace in Anchorage that buying transit or peering from one or a few ISPs is significant enough, or is it going back to Seattle anyway and
> the local ISPs already have done the math.

What I've seen is that in smaller markets (in my previous life), eg: Michigan, even when the providers are all in the same facility they

1) Lacked understanding of traffic-patterns to understand peering savings
2) Lacked ability to interconnect (eg: no switch on-site, no bgp/routing capability)
3) CLEC or other colo provider prohibited #2

This meant traffic would regularly be diverted to Chicago or similar for exchange between local ISPs.

The one time I was able to pull off a local facility cross-connect, it was difficult to get it at a speed greater than 10megs (this was 1999 or so).

With the dropping metro-ethernet/ftth type equipment that can do 1G for "cheap", perhaps a short fiber build for x-connect would help faciltiate things these days.  (i should model that and post the results).
- Jared