Buying IP Bandwidth Across a Peering Exchange

Clayton clayton at mnsi.net
Sun Nov 30 23:13:40 UTC 2014



When we first lit our wavelength to Chicago, we had them terminate it in a
cabinet at Equnix.  We then had our transit provider terminate in the
cabinet and we threw a patch cable in.  No power ordered initially.

It served its purpose for the interim, but we eventually put a switch in
once we connected to Equnix's peering service too.

During the period where we simply had a cross connect with no active
equipment, we didn't really have any problems with it, but I agree it
isn't the best situation.

I was actually pretty amazed at how much traffic we had shift over to
peering once we turned up - significant.  I'd say that we now get 2/3 of
our inbound by peering, the rest via transit.  Netflix is the obvious
reason...



----- Original Message ---------------

Subject: Re: Buying IP Bandwidth Across a Peering Exchange
   From: Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com>
   Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 14:14:21 -0600
     To: Rob Seastrom <rs at seastrom.com>
     Cc: NANOG <nanog at nanog.org>

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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