On Mar 4, 2010, at 8:13 AM, Sean Donelan wrote: > On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Antonio Querubin wrote: >> On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Sean Donelan wrote: >> >>> Are there any common locations in Alaska where multiple local ISPs exchange traffic, either transit or peering? Or is Seattle the closest exchange point for Alaska ISPs? >> >> peeringdb.com lists only SIX (in Seattle) and PAIX Seattle. > > Thanks and also thanks to the other folks that replied privately. That matches basically what I had found, but I wanted to check. > > Transit is also ok, I'm doing the usual minimum connections/maximum communications in case of (earthquake, volcano, tsunomi, etc) math. Is > there someplace in Anchorage that buying transit or peering from one or a few ISPs is significant enough, or is it going back to Seattle anyway and > the local ISPs already have done the math. > >What I've seen is that in smaller markets (in my previous life), eg: Michigan, even when the providers are all in the same facility they > >1) Lacked understanding of traffic-patterns to understand peering savings >2) Lacked ability to interconnect (eg: no switch on-site, no bgp/routing capability) >3) CLEC or other colo provider prohibited #2 > >This meant traffic would regularly be diverted to Chicago or similar for exchange between local ISPs.
>The one time I was able to pull off a local facility cross-connect, it was difficult to get it at a speed greater than 10megs (this was 1999 or so). >With the dropping metro-ethernet/ftth type equipment that can do 1G for "cheap", perhaps a short fiber build for x-connect would help faciltiate things >these days. (i should model that and post the results). >- Jared We've seen the same issues in Minnesota. Locally referred to as the "Chicago Problem". Adding on to point 3, there is also a lack of neutral facilities with a sufficient amount of traffic to justify the next carrier connecting. In rural areas many times the two ISPs that provide services are enemies at the business level. A couple of us have started to talk about starting an exchange point. With transit being so cheap it is sometimes difficult to justify paying for the x-connects for a small piece of the routing table. Have you considered starting your own exchange point with some of the local players? Just having the connectivity in place may help with DR situations in addition to all of the benefits of an exchange point. I would also be very interested in seeing any modeling on the subject. There was a document a couple of years ago that was pretty good talking about when to peer but if memory serves it was more focused on the larger carriers. Jay
