My Blog
DrPeering -
Q: Why does your site assume a data center has to be operated by a non-ISP and non-carrier?
Bud Fox
A: A few years back I learned first hand from an Internet Service Provider in Turkey why neutrality is an important characteristic of Internet Data Centers marketed as colocation centers.
He shared with me the following story.
There were really only three Internet Service Providers in Turkey, and the Internet traffic exchanged between them traversed the Atlantic Ocean (twice!) before reaching each others customers! This was a perfect place to apply Internet Peering, a direct business relationship between competitors whereby they each freely exchange access to each others customers.
But there was no Internet Exchange Point in Turkey to host an ethernet switch, and no separate commercial or association-based entity to oversee the Internet Exchange Point.
Well, one of the ISPs volunteered to buy the switch and host it at his data center, and even would provide free rack space in his data center. I will call him ISP A. The other two ISPs agreed and they built into his data center and the three ISPs peered with each other.
The traffic volume grew as a side effect of lower latency and lower packet loss. The importance of the Turkish Internet Exchange, owned and operated by ISP A, was recognized as the key to the successful information economy in Turkey and everyone celebrated.
Shortly after that celebration, ISP A started touting his ISP as being “the center of the Turkish Internet”, pointing to the amount of traffic traversing his data center, and the prestige and recognition it had received from operating the Internet Exchange Point. As a side effect, it garnered increased market share, which reinforced its market positioning that it was the center of the Turkish Internet.
The other two ISPs did not like this at all but could not pull out from the Internet Exchange and go back to having their traffic traversing the ocean again.
This is a cautionary tale that illustrates why around the world an Internet Exchange Point is generally operated by a neutral third party, one that does not compete against the participants.These are the motivations that have made the non-neutral IXes all but extinct. One thing that we have learned is that the long road from real estate to an Internet Data Center to a Colocation center and onto the destination of being a successful commercial Internet Exchange Point requires business model neutrality among other things.
For those of you building data centers, trying to make colocation centers, or investing in real estate data centers, I talk a little bit more about the tricks of the trade from IX operators in the IX Playbook, The European vs U.S. Internet Exchange Points, and Modeling the Value of an Internet Exchange. This is part of the base level of knowledge for IX operators, and the basis of a one-day workshop that was developed for IX operators. Colocation centers and Internet Exchange Points are not just lucky pieces of real estate.
Why is Internet Exchange Point neutrality important?
January 20, 2011
The 2014 Internet Peering Playbook
In Print
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The 2013 Internet Peering Playbook
also available for the Kindle:
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