Puerto Rico Internet Exchange

Sat Sep 29 21:34:33 UTC 2018

Hi Mehmet -
    You mention the SIX so I figured I'd chime in on this thread, despite being
an old one.
    We were in a similar situation in early 1997 - Seattle was a backwoods as 
far
as internet infrastructure, with the nearest hub of activity being Mae-West /
PAIX, and not a whole lot else in our neck of the woods. We had tried to build
some momentum with a T1/Frame-relay based multi-point peering fabric which came
online in early '96, but it never got past 5 or 6 participants and didn't get
much traction with some providers in the region.
    We had talked about doing an ethernet based exchange in the Westin, and the
University of Washington had started talking about building the SNNAP (Seattle
Network to Network Access Point) which started up a mailing list in early '97,
but it seemed to always be just over the horizon. (It eventually launched as 
the
Pacific Northwest Gigapop, but not until much later, and focused on research 
and
education orgs).
    When Chris and I were sitting together at Nanog 10, Bill Manning gave a
couple presentations - "International Exchange Points: Growth & Trends" and
"Large & Small Exchange Points: Advantages,Tradeoffs, Futures", and one of his
key points was something along the lines of "any exchange point with 3 or more
participants is a successful exchange point". This was ultimately the final
nudge that was needed to convince us to start the peering point, and shortly
after we got back from Tampa we threw a hub in on a port I was using for a
private peering session and we were in business. We've grown a lot since then,
certainly the emergence of Seattle as a key content market helped a lot, but I
think you can draw some parallels.
    If you measure success as having three participants peering, and you find a
way to get off the ground with minimal costs (or as in our case, none at all),
it's easy to succeed in a not-for-profit model.
    My advice to you is to not worry about if any out of region folks are going
to show up - find a space that folks operating in the region can get to easily,
build something that is inexpensive to keep online, keep it simple, and get 3
participants. Once you're there - look for the 4th, and so on.

Good luck,
Nikos

On Thu, 13 Sep 2018, Mehmet Akcin wrote:

>  It has been little over a year and we have been working on launching an
>  internet exchange in puerto rico but of course hurricane and other things
>  got in the way of achieving this.
>
>  We now have identified what we believe the right location (most of the
>  isp’s have presence in this location) backbone/ip transit connectivity,
>  local team to provide onsite support.
>
>  Having said that We have been engaged with several content delivery
>  networks, OTTs but general feedback was that Puerto Rico was not on their
>  radar for 2018 hence delayed launch. Now we are talking to same players
>  about 2019 but general answer seemed like people were satisfied enough to
>  serve Puerto Rico from Miami.
>
>  Perhaps we are talking to really big CDNs, OTTs and we should engage
>  differently however the level of interest is very low and I really don’t
>  want to “build and they will come” again ;-)
>
>  Bottom line is, if there was an IXP in Puerto Rico similar to ones in
>  Florida, I am trying to understand who would actually deploy (just speak to
>  your company only please) because most of my assumptions were proven wrong
>  ;-)
>
>  I guess I want to ask two questions, given its location in caribbean, does
>  Puerto Rico need an internet exchange point? Would you join it?(it will be
>  a membership based IXP where members share cost)
>
>  Mehmet
>
>  On Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 4:27 AM Mehmet Akcin <mehmet at akcin.net> wrote:
>
>>  Hey there!
>>
>>  ... ok this time I am not going to call it PRIX ;) well name doesn't
>>  matter really. Nearly 13 years ago I have attempted to start Puerto rico
>>  Internet exchange in San Juan. I have lived there over 5 years and i just
>>  wanted to really watch videos faster. The project somewhat died when i
>>  moved to LA but now there are few interested party to start an internet
>>  exchange in Puerto rico. The jsland historically had one of the slowest
>>  broadband/internet services which seemed to have improved in recent years
>>  however as of 2017 there still is not an IX in Puerto rico.
>>
>>  We , 3-4 internet engineers (on island and remote) , want to look into
>>  relaunch of this IX and hopefully find a way to keep local traffic
>>  exchanged at high speeds and low cost. We need expertise, and people who
>>  want to help any way they can.
>>
>>  We are trying to make this IX a not-for-profit one and we are looking at
>>  opeeating models to adapt which has worked incredibly well like Seattle IX.
>>
>>  We are hoping the relaunch to happen sometime in 2018. Thanks in advance
>>  hope to share more info and traffic data sometime , soon. Watch this space!
>>
>>  Mehmet
>>
>  --
>  Mehmet
>  +1-424-298-1903
>