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December 30, 2002
Internet Peering
A little over a year ago, I started a project to lower UEN's Internet bandwidth costs and improve Internet performance. UEN has been a long-time supporter and beneficiary of local and regional peering through the Utah Community Internet Exchange (CommIX, a project I co-founded with Christian Nielsen around 1996). I wanted to extend that to the national arena, by peering with other networks at national exchange points.
TouchAmerica was awarded the contract to build us a distance peering network using MPLS to transport Ethernet from UEN to the exchange points. Distance peering is a recently-popular alternative to more traditional peering architectures, because it is more cost-effective and less resource-intensive, and enables smaller organizations like UEN to benefit from peering.
I decided to start with PAIX in Palo Alto, Calif. because of the number of networks there who want to peer with anyone they can. For a network like ours, with a very large number of end users (estimated at 500,000), peering with networks like Microsoft (MSN, Hotmail, etc) and Yahoo will offload significant amounts of traffic to less-expensive and better-performing connections that we have better control over. As we add peering in Chicago and on the East Coast next year, our ability to manage Internet connectivity will increase, as we further reduce our Internet bandwidth costs.
The financial troubles at many large ISPs and telcos have really changed the peering environment. Content providers such as Yahoo and MSN have started managing their own peering, and smaller service providers, enterprises and government organizations (like UEN) are now able to take advantage of peering. Companies like Equinix and PAIX are creating ecosystems around the exchange points they operate, where a number of very inexpensive bandwidth-related services (peering, distance peering, transit) are starting to crop up from various service providers. I think we will see more value-added services (security, content services, performance measurement and enhancement) offered at these exchanges in the near future.
Over the Christmas break I am installing the PAIX link (things do take a long time in government) and setting up our first peering relationships. I expect to offload about 20-30% of our Internet traffic to about 20-30 peers this week. We already offload about 10-15% of our Internet traffic to Internet2/Abilene, which is essentially a (much better) overlay network for education/research.
UEN has also been promoting the CommIX for other local and regional peering needs. UEN has participated with the Utah CommIX since 1997, and has encouraged networks such as US West, Novell, and most recently TouchAmerica to peer locally. I have been working with local communities as they build municipal networks (broadband/fiber to the home), and have had some success with them adopting the CommIX model to facilitate inter-city connectivity. The Utah Valley Community Network is building a CommIX exchange with multiple locations throughout Utah County, where several cities, ISPs and UEN will peer. Hopefully other Utah cities will adopt a similar model.
I think it'll be interesting to watch what happens with national, regional and local peering over the next several years. As broadband gets deployed deeper into the network, and closer to the home, I think peering and exchange point services will become much more important to many more organizations.
Posted by pete at December 30, 2002 12:04 PM
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