« H.323 deficiencies and SIP opportunities | Main | I'm a genius, you're an idiot »
March 13, 2003
Quilting in Boston
I attended a meeting of The Quilt in Boston Tuesday and Wednesday. The Quilt is a consortium of gigapops, that facilitates collaboration on issues that are important to gigapops throughout the US. Recent Quilt projects include group negotiations for better Internet pricing, regional peering and fiber infrastructure development.
This was my first Quilt meeting. I have participated in the Peering Project since January, so I know some of the people but hadn't met anyone yet. One of the reasons I went was to participate in the roll-out of the first major milestones of the Peering Project. This included a Peering Toolkit to help Quilt members learn how to start peering regionally, something I'm very proud to have been part of developing. I got to present on the CommIX project UEN has worked on for many years, and had several other gigapops express interest in doing the same.
It's really exciting to see what The Quilt has accomplished in a short period of time. The results of the Commodity Internet Services project are phenominal; UEN will be able to save about 30% on our Internet budget once we can take advantage of Quilt prices. I expect we will find similar benefits from the peering project, that instead of trying to attract peers on our own, we can negotiate for peering on behalf of a huge group of users and large amounts of bandwidth.
The Quilt is a collaborative consortium. There are no membership fees, as an Internet2 gigapop we qualify by having four connectors. The consortium succeeds because gigapops freely contribute time to the group, and buy into the success of the consortium. It's really exciting to be part of a group that has produced great results and has such great potential.
Posted by pete at March 13, 2003 07:06 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry: