Re: a little thought on exchanging traffic

[Blake Willis <blakew () cais net>]

Yes.  Actaully there has been a bit of hypothetical conversation about
this very topic chez moi.  I suppose this could be set up as a sort of
national extension of the CIX.  The question that needs to be answered if
such a national ATM "exchange" were to be created is the issue of what
exactly it could be used for.  Do you set it up like a national exchange,
and only allow providers to exchange traffic with other providers, or do
you set it up more like the Ebone, allowing providers to connect in
multiple metropolitan areas and use the national exchange's bandwidth
instead of building their own backbone?  And do you set up a national ATM
cloud connecting all the existing NAPs and allow anyone to peer with
anyone else anywhere, or simply have a national ATM cloud directly
connecting providers, or both?  Of course, it would be a bit harder to get
all the FDDI NAPs onto ATM but isn't WorldCom supposed to have ATM at
MAE-East by Q3 this year (leaving only PAIX and SprintNAP)?  At this
point, sending packets via FedEx seems to be more reliable than MAE-East,
(FedEx is a little slower but at least ALL the packets get there
eventually) so any functional alternative is welcome...

        -Blake

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Blake Willis                                            703-448-4470x483
Network Engineer, New Customers                         blakew () cais net
CAIS Internet, a CGX Communications Company
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On Tue, 19 May 1998 black () bleep ishiboo com wrote:

> Anyone thought about eliminating large physical exchange points and replacing 
> them with a more distributed architecture?
>
> Multiple data centers interconnected over ATM in a single metro area run by
> indepdenant entities who are free to provide any level of service or value
> add they wish.  
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Ben
> black () ishiboo com