Tom Hill wrote: > IXP mbit/sec cost: > https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18ztPX_ysWYqEhJlf2SKQQsTNRbkwoxPSfaC6ScEZAG8/edit#gid=0
Dave's preso at GPF was intended to refer specifically to the largest 4 IXPs in europe rather than to the IXP ecosystem as a whole. The costings denomination in US$ at today's exchange rate was surprising for two reasons: first, many if not most US companies who get connectivity at european IXPs will both take in their revenue and foot the bill in euros or UK£, not US$, thereby insulating the company against currency fluctuations. Secondly, there was a 30% drop in the € and £ compared to the US$ over the period shown on his graphs. In other words, a 30% drop in effective pricing has been omitted from the graphs. If you take this into account, AMS-IX's pricing drops are proportionally larger than transit drops and the core argument of the talk is weakened. The reason given for making this decision was because infrastructure / equipment costs are generally based on US$. That's fine except that the primary cost of running an IXP in europe has never been related to hardware costs - capex generally makes up a surprisingly small amount of the overall expenditure of an IXP. The #1 cost of most IXPs is relating to hiring people. This is often overlooked in the US because most US IXPs are run either on a voluntary basis (i.e. unpaid or else well below market rates), or else owned/run by data centres, who run them as inhouse value-adds. There are some exceptions to this, but not many. European IXPs are mostly independent, self-funded organisations which usually pay reasonable rates to retain staff. Obviously, it's up to any organisation how they want to handle their staffing requirements, but there is nothing stopping anyone from running an IXP in europe using donated hardware and volunteers chipping in a hand or having staff seconded from their primary jobs, and where the equipment is located in a single hosting facility with no inter-site connectivity. This would certainly cause prices to drop, no doubt about it. The other aspect that was omitted from this talk is that some of the larger European IXPs do stuff which is unrelated to shifting bits between switch ports. E.g. public advocacy (LINX), DNS root servers (Netnod). I'm not going to pretend to be a neutral observer in this: this is important work. If the internet community doesn't step up to sustain efforts against the tsunami of regulatory stupidity it constantly faces, we will end up being ruled by an unholy triad of the ITU, the european commish and (in the case of the uk) a wholly unrestrained Home Office. It's understandable that some people would prefer just to pay for bit-shifting. If that's what they want, there is nothing to stop them from voting with their wallets and moving their traffic elsewhere: it's a free and fully unregulated market. > 5) With the exception of INEX, all the prices used are publicly available INEX's pricing is publicly available. The google spreadsheet was updated earlier with the correct url. Nick INEX CTO hat on
