Hi all -
I understand that there is a real glut of AP transoceanic capacity, particularly on the Japan-US cable where twice as much capacity is idle as is in use. This has sent the price point down to historic levels, O($28K/mo for STM-1) or less than $200/Mbps for transport! This is approaching an attractive price point for long distance peering so, just for grins,...
Are there transport providers that can provide a price point around $100/Mbps for transport capacity from Tokyo to the U.S. (LAX/SJO) ?
What are the technical issue with extreme long distance (transoceanic) peering?
In particular, what are the issues interconnecting layer 2 switches across the ocean for the purposes of providing a global peering cloud using:
0) vanilla circuit transport to interconnect the switches
1) MPLS framed ethernet service to interconnect the switches
2) tunnelled transport over transit to interconnect the switches
Thanks in advance.
Bill
But, given that peering costs are more than just the circuit cost (once
you include Exchange Point costs, and colo, etc), why would anyone do this
when you can just buy transit for $100/Mbps or less?
I'm going through this at work at the moment, and am having problems
justifying staying at the West Coast, having only just justified the
East Coast, so going to AP (although it's what I'd want to do), is just
way out of the question...
Simon
simonl@rd.bbc.co.uk (Simon Lockhart) writes:
But, given that peering costs are more than just the circuit cost (once
you include Exchange Point costs, and colo, etc), why would anyone do this
when you can just buy transit for $100/Mbps or less?
Because peering is better. There's no way to become DDoS attack-resistant
if you buy transit, since no matter how strong you are, your provider will
ultimately be weaker. Whether that's because high splay is required to be
strong, or because your provider's security team isn't on a two-minute call
back, or because your provider has a larger set of things to invest their
capital in than your particular path out, doesn't matter. The fact is, no
cost-effective transit will ever be as good as the best high-splay peering.
I'm going through this at work at the moment, and am having problems
justifying staying at the West Coast, having only just justified the
East Coast, so going to AP (although it's what I'd want to do), is just
way out of the question...
OPN (other people's networks) are the second most frequent root cause of
connectivity failure. (Network engineers are the most frequent cause, per
Vijay's excellent talk in Eugene.) The most reliable access you can get is
when you connect to other networks directly rather than using intermediaries.
Naturally, with a high number of other networks and of places to meet them,
it's only cost effective to peer globally if you have "enough" traffic and
if that traffic's reliability bears directly on your top-line revenue.
Thanks all for your responses (both public and private). Several folks wanted to know what I found out so...
I heard from a couple companies that are operating wide area distributed peering architectures today. They claim that the biggest issues has been the perception among prospects that "ethernet isn't supposed to do that (extreme long distance)." I'd love to hear more experiences both pro/con.
(I have to admit I was surprised that *transoceanic ethernet* as a shared peering transport did not have serious issues. I would have expected that the time delay from the time a broadcast was transmitted to the time it was heard would have been an issue somehow, or some such interesting problems would come up.)
Several VLAN configuration issues came up as a design consideration for wide area peering infrastructure. For example
a) a VLAN for each peering session vs.
b) one VLAN per each customer to which others "subscribe" and peer across vs.
c) a global VLAN which nobody likes.
There are policy and design tradeoffs with each of these that touch on the limitation of 4096 VLANs .
As for transport, MPLS framing of ethernet seems to work well. The question of tunneling transport over existing transit connections has proven effective to trialing but may be more expensive as the traffic volume increases. Running circuits of dedicated access can reduce the risk of running out of capacity on a "shared" transit or MPLS IX interconnect fabric.
As for the operator of the transport between distributed switches, Joe Provo is correct that it need not be the IX operator. IX neutrality generally means that the IX Operator is not aligned with any one participant in the IX, but rather is working to the benefit of all of it IX participants. If an IX Operator's actions unnecessarily favor or harm one participant over another, then neutrality may an issue. Extending the population of an IX by using a distributed architecture doesn't necessarily clash with this neutrality principle, especially if doing so is solely for extending peer-peer interconnection. And no, this is not a new idea; the LINX, AMSIX, etc. have been doing this for a long time and the key seems to be that the IX switches are under one autonomous control.
Bill