Buying IP Bandwidth Across a Peering Exchange

Colton Conor colton.conor at gmail.com
Tue Nov 25 19:51:47 UTC 2014


The exchange in question is Equinix. Their sales team is leading me
to believe there are multiple exchange products. One where you can peer
with providers (Google, Netflix for example) and then one where you can
create virtual private layer 2 vlans between providers. Then there is also
the traditional cross connect fee of $350 if you want to go from one
cage/rack to the other.

So in a situation where we are getting a 10Gig transport wave to Equinix,
we would ideally like to split this wave's use to 5Gbps of traffic going to
the peering exchange for traffic going directly to Google, Netflix, and
other CDN's, and then 5Gbps of pure IP transit going to a low cost provider
like HE.net. Of course providers like HE.NET are also peers on the peering
exchange, so it seems possible that we could just opening a peering
conenction with them.

I think the way most providers would do this would be to get a rack and
power with Equinix. Pay a cross connect fee from the wave provider to our
rack. Pay for an exchange port (which includes a cross connect to the
exchange) for the 5GBPS of traffic going to Netflix, Google, etc. And then
pay for yet another cross connect going to HE.net's cage to get pure IP
from them.

If I can buy transit directly I avoid the expenses of having to pay for
space, power, another router/switch, plus a second cross connect. Thats
quite a bit of money saved.

Are exchanges really that unreliable compared to a traditional cross
connect?

On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 12:52 PM, Ammar Zuberi <ammar at fastreturn.net> wrote:

> Hi Conor,
>
> I know this is possible since Hurricane Electric does it for IPv6 transit,
> however, I'm not sure if it violates any exchange rules or if it's even a
> good idea.
>
> > On 25 Nov 2014, at 10:47 pm, Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > I know typically peering exchanges are made for peering traffic between
> > providers, but can you buy IP transit from a provider on an exchange? An
> > example, buy a 10G port on an exchange, peer 5Gbps of traffic with
> multiple
> > providers on the exchange, and buy 5Gbps of IP transit from others on the
> > exchange?
> >
> > Some might ask why not get a cross connect to the provider. It is cheaper
> > to buy an port on the exchange (which includes the cross connect to the
> > exchange) than buy multiple cross connects. Plus we are planning on
> getting
> > a wave to the exchange, and not having any physical routers or switches
> at
> > the datacenter where the exchange/wave terminates at. Is this possible?
>



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