Deepak, If it were as easy as you make it sound, I can assure you people would be doing it.
Also, does your Equinix MSA contain a non-compete clause, which could be interpreted to mean you can't run a competing IX (metro fabric, exchange, whatever) out of their facilities? I hear many do. Drive Slow, PAUL WALL On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 11:15 PM, Deepak Jain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Warning: This may actually be operational too. > > Given Cogent (and others) recent pursuit of sub $4/mb/s transit... and the > relatively flat cost of a "paid" peering fabric (even at 10G) and the O(N) > costs for cross-connects, the thought of revisiting the old peering coops > presented itself again. > > Assuming 10G PNI model: Assuming even nominal cross-connect fees of > $100-$300/month per fiber pair, plus router port costs for each private peer > (assuming you aren't at >10% utilization on the port) at a commercial > exchange, you are eating a pretty significant cost per megabit you are > actually moving. (plug in your numbers here). Assumption: Above 1Gb/s > utilization, this makes sense or you are counting on growth. > > Below 10% you would normally go to a paid peering fabric where you are > paying cross connect + a flat port charge + router port for 1->N peers and > hoping that enough utilization occurs that you get >10% utilization (to > recover capex, opex, etc) and then whatever additional utilization you need > to cover the flat port charge or you are counting on growth. > > A "coop", best-effort switch fabric colo'd at a few sites would allow > participants to peer off traffic at a price of the order of a single > cross-connect (~$500/month per 10G port is possible, maybe less), > private-VLANs all-around, or to only-mutually approved peers (e.g. via an > automated web interface, prior art) to avoid many of the /old/ issues. No > requirement for multi-lateral peering. You could peer, sell transit, buy > transit, multicast, etc. > > The way I figure it, it removes approximately an order of magnitude from the > operational cost of peering with more than a handful of your largest single > talkers. Especially as 100G LAN Ethernet becomes production before 100G WAN > connections become commonplace. Economic theory (assuming that worked on the > Internet) suggests this would allow for the increase in number of peers by > approximately an order of magnitude (maybe more). > > Does this actually improve the present-day "rationale" to peer, or are most > operations' costs so far above (from long haul, etc) or so far below (since > the cost of transit has dropped so much) that this is no longer a relevant > part of the equation? > > Warning: This may actually be operational too. > > Deepak Jain > AiNET > >