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