Large & Small Exchange Points: Advantages, Tradeoffs, Futures

Bill Manning

Table of Contents

• Stan Barber's Notes
• June 1997 NANOG Home Page

Stan Barber's Notes

dGIX - distributed Layer 2 (Peter Lothberg)

ColoIX - April 94

3 Classes of Connectivity

• National - no transit, at many exchanges
• Large - need transit, a few exchanges
• Local - no transit, buy service from the above

Private/BiLAT is not the same as a Provider-Subscriber relationship.

Is there anything in the middle?

There is too much demand to be serviced by any single provider.

Do "we" need to cooperate with locals?

• Media issues that affect cost
  • Does the medial provide limitless growth?
  • Wide/local costs
  • The LAN media is usually not much faster than the LAN link. It makes more sense to
  • privately peer.
• Topology/technology tectonics
  • Native multicast
  • CoS/QoS
  • Source routing

Questions & Answers

Bill asks for clarification concerning the issues involving the speed of exchanges vs. the speed of the WAN attached to the exchange. Bill says that right now, the fastest exchange point is 200 Mb/sec. Two OC-3s connected to the exchange will fill up the exchange LAN.

Please help me understand the Vadim’s classifications. A National would be like Genuity. A large would be like Los Nettos. A small would be like Bill’s Bate shop.

Randy notes that the large players are still afraid to peer at the naps. Billl agees.