(I know little about AMS-IX and am still waiting for someone from there to get back to me...)
My NA bandwidth right now is ~200Mbps and about half of that appears to be EU destined. I'm opening an EU POP soon and am trying to figure out what sort of value AMS-IX would give me.
Does it simply provide an easy way to privately connect to transit and peers? Or can I also go crazy and peer with anyone who wants to peer (like in the olden day!) ?
There are plenty of ISPs both at AMSIX and LINX and they're mostly very happy to peer with people that they would otherwise see thru US transit partner. My guess is that you'll be able to offload quite a bit of your EU transit if you connect to AMSIX.
If you otoh purchase EU transit thru someone, it's quite likely that a chunk of the bigger EU ISPs won't peer with you ("we already peer with your upstream") so you probably want to think about how you're going to play the peering game! 
Otoh purchasing transit in Amsterdam will probably get you quite decent pricing and with your low traffic volume it might make economic sense to wait with the peering until you have grown into higher volume.
I'd say AMS-IX is mostly for peering with a lot of people, if that answers your question.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
matthew zeier wrote:
Does it simply provide an easy way to privately connect to transit and
peers? Or can I also go crazy and peer with anyone who wants to peer
(like in the olden day!) ?
EU peering is very different from US peering (as many have found out when the
hop across the pond) if you can find which networks the traffic is going to then
look at LINX, AMS-IX and DE-CIX to see where you will get the best coverage then
you will find that many networks will peer (but check their peering rules).
Have a look at peeringdb.com for more help
J
- --
Entanet International
ps we'll peer 
If it's your sole/first european peering point you should also consider the LINX in London. In terms of traffic, routes and peering partners both LINX and AMS-IX are similar. This isn't an accident as both peering points are of a similar age, run in a similar fashion and they cooperate a lot at the management level sharing experiences etc. LINX works out cheaper for most folks but there's not a lot in it. If you're an anglophone it might tip you slightly towards London but equally it's hard to find an educated Dutchman who does not speak good English. The LINX has slightly more member input into its operations with more general meetings than AMS-IX holds.
Costs for leased lines from the states to either Linx, Ams-Ix or DE-Cix are
all more or less the same.
You should chose the ixp from you can benefit most. DE-Cix has done a lot in
the past few months to attract more members from eastern Europe. Because of
its position just in the middle of Europe you should have the best coverage
to western as well as eastern Europe.
A short comparison:
Exchange / Traffic on public exchange vlan / Number of members
LINX: ~ 77 Gbps / 210 members
AMS-IX: ???* Gbps / 244 members
DE-CIX: 51 Gbps / 184 members
* = the webpage says about 110 Gbps but as far as I know a lot of Dutch isps
are carrying some sort of mirror-traffic over the ams-ix because of legal
monitoring reasons (correct me if I'm wrong)
If you ask me then AMS-IX and LINX are both very good exchanges. The de-cix
is a little bit smaller but has a lot of potential due to eastern Europe
isps joining more and more.
Gunther
Without getting in the middle of the eternal contest over who is better,
LINX or AMS-IX (each has its own advantages and disadvantages), the AMS-IX
website says 165Gbps, the LINX website says 95Gbps (actual publicly
switched traffic), and the DECIX website says 71Gbps. Some portion of the
AMS-IX traffic seems to be Dutch-specific content that stays in the
country, but there is plenty of global traffic there too.
Exchange / Traffic on public exchange vlan / Number of members
LINX: ~ 77 Gbps / 210 members
AMS-IX: ???* Gbps / 244 members
DE-CIX: 51 Gbps / 184 members
I'm curious if any US based IXs exceed 100Gbps. Or has Amsterdam and London become the center of the Internet universe?
Not everyone publishes their traffic stats, some pseudo-publically, and
some not at all. The total for every Equinix Exchange in the US (thats
Ashburn, New York Metro, Chicago, Dallas, San Jose, and Los Angeles)
combined is currently only 93Gbps peak (a huge upsurge since they launched
a 10GE product several months back, it was at 40Gbps before that). Equinix
is pretty much the vast majority of interesting public peering in the US
today, with the closest runners-up being PAIX Palo Alto (numbers
unpublished, but speculation is around 35Gbps), followed by NYIIX
(16Gbps). It is probably safe to speculate that AMSIX is as large or
larger than all of the public peering in the US combined.
Why the difference? Well for starters, the US exchange points are
typically priced at 3-6x the equivilent sized port at LINX AMSIX DECIX
etc, so it just doesn't make economic sense for most US networks to peer
publically. Also, US exchange points are almost all run by commercial
facility operators who use the ix's to promote colocation and
crossconnects in their facilities, vs the European exchange points who are
colocation facility neutral. The US IX operators are not motivated to
promote "as many people as possible on the exchanges", since this just
means increased costs of operating the switches with no new colo and
reduced crossconnect revenue. They're satisfied with keeping the exchanges
priced at a premium, as an "entry level" point for new users and "low
speed peer aggregator" for bigger networks, and then making everyone else
use private peering.
Thus the vast majority of peering in the US happens via private
interconnection instead of via public peering. Of course this is a self
feeding cycle too, because of the low cost and ease of entry there are
hundreds of networks of every ilk peering at the European exchanges, which
means there are far more open-peering people compared to the US exchanges.
This makes it very attractive for even US based companies to get started
peering with a pseudowire to Europe, compared with going to a US exchange.
Also, not that it matters (because the absurdly high pricing has kept new
customer turnup at an absolute minimum), but most of the facilities where
the US exchange points are run from are currently "sold out", particularly
to new customers.
Without getting in the middle of the eternal contest over who
is better, LINX or AMS-IX (each has its own advantages and
disadvantages), the AMS-IX website says 165Gbps, the LINX
website says 95Gbps (actual publicly switched traffic), and
the DECIX website says 71Gbps. Some portion of the AMS-IX
traffic seems to be Dutch-specific content that stays in the
country, but there is plenty of global traffic there too.
I've just been in touch with a colleague of mine and he has to add the
following:
"Hey a biased analysis,
IIRC AMS-IX allows all kind of traffic including upstream, not only peering
traffic. DE-CIX is peering only. I assume the CIXes in US behave similar.
Besides that, I wonder what kind of hardware will they be using in the
future, assuming they grow like all other CIXes...."
[I'm posting for Andreas John here because he's currently not subscribed to
this list. Hope that's okay for you.]
Regards,
Gunther
There is no "fair" stat, since you cannot quantify an IX into a single dimension.
Equinix Ashburn almost certainly carries more traffic through the building than AMS-IX carries, probably by many times, but that stat is not published as most of the traffic is over PI.
The AMS-IX member list includes people hooking up for VoIP peering and other things at Kbps instead of Mbps or Gbps.
There is a building in Seoul, South Korea, which some claim passes multiple terabits per second over private peering. (Honestly, I don't believe that number, but it's been claimed.)
Etc., etc.
The numbers mean what the numbers mean. AMS-IX has more traffic flowing over their public switch infrastructure than any other public exchange in the world. This means only and exactly that AMS-IX has more traffic flowing over their public switch infrastructure than any other public exchange in the world - nothing more, nothing less.
If you base your buying / peering requirements on one dimension of an n-dimensional decision matrix, you are probably not choosing optimally.
All that said, AMS-IX is an outstanding IX. A network with significant European traffic is almost certain to find peering at AMS-IX beneficial. But the same is true for other exchanges (e.g. LINX).
I've just been in touch with a colleague of mine and he has to add the following:
"Hey a biased analysis, IIRC AMS-IX allows all kind of traffic including upstream, not only peering traffic. DE-CIX is peering only. I assume the CIXes in US behave similar. Besides that, I wonder what kind of hardware will they be using in the future, assuming they grow like all other CIXes...."
AMS-IX allows the exchange of IPv4 and IPv6 traffic and doesn't mind whether you pay to receive certain prefixes. At any IXP, you can only send traffic towards peers that actually announced the netblocks to you [give or take next-hop fudging that some allow and some disallow].
* patrick@ianai.net (Patrick W. Gilmore) [Fri 25 Aug 2006, 14:34 CEST]:
There is no "fair" stat, since you cannot quantify an IX into a single dimension.
Equinix Ashburn almost certainly carries more traffic through the building than AMS-IX carries, probably by many times, but that stat is not published as most of the traffic is over PI.
Excellent example on why this is not a fair comparison, as Equinix Ashburn is a building and AMS-IX is a collection of Ethernet switches.
Given that the internal sequential numbering for fibers at NIKHEF (one of four housing sites with an AMS-IX switch) runs into the thousand, I'm willing to believe that the amount of traffic exchanged over private interconnects at all four locations is significant, if not way bigger than what's sent across the AMS-IX platform.
All that said, AMS-IX is an outstanding IX. A network with significant European traffic is almost certain to find peering at AMS-IX beneficial. But the same is true for other exchanges (e.g. LINX).
Thanks, Patrick.
TIE,
-- Niels.