Buying IP Bandwidth Across a Peering Exchange

Colton Conor colton.conor at gmail.com
Sun Nov 30 20:14:21 UTC 2014


Yes, we could of course pay for some space and power with a shared hosting
provider, but buying a full rack and power for a single router seems silly.
The ideal person to buy the small amount of space and power from would be
the transport provider that is transporting us to Equinix, but in most
cases those are large providers like Level3 who aren't interested nor
willing to sell us a quarter of a cabinet. If we were to get space directly
with Equnix then we would have yet another cross connect from the transport
provider to our rack.

The whole point on getting to the exchange is to peer with providers like
Netflix and Google as this would be for an eyeball network, but after you
add up the cost of the rack, power, cross connects, exchange ports, etcs I
am not seeing the value in doing so. Espically with some of the Tier 1's
willing to sell us Gbps IP transit links for almost the cost of the
transport back to an peering location.



On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 12:13 PM, Rob Seastrom <rs at seastrom.com> wrote:

>
> Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > 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?
>
> "Technically possible" and "advisable" are two different things.  If
> you enjoy finger-pointing on the occasions where you are trying to
> smoke out performance issues, I encourage as many third, fourth, and
> fifth-party-managed network layers in the mix as possible.  A wave
> with no way to test to the handoff point would of course be the icing
> on the cake.
>
> Are you sure you can't afford to sublet a few ru of space from someone
> and pay for a couple extra cross connects?
>
> -r
>
>



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