[AusNOG] ubiquitous peering

[Tom Sykes]

Michael,

I think you need to separate the ability to serve content locally (i.e. on a POI by POI basis) versus being able to host vast quantities of content delivery equipment in the sites.

The very nature of the distributed POIs (i.e. 121 locations) means you can interconnect at a "local" level and serve content to a specific group of people, rather than necessarily long-lining everything back to a central place. There are a few considerations, though, such as the point at which traffic volumes justify that level of investment (i.e. pushing CDN equipment out to those POIs).

Where and who hosts the equipment is a very different matter. There is a pretty big gap between building a datacentre designed for extremely dense/power hungry content/storage infrastructure and building a site designed to interconnect networks together (and accommodate the modest equipment needs associated with that). POIs are designed for the latter - they are designed for interconnection. 

If the local content distribution market becomes vast (as you predict) then I'm sure there will be a positive business case for some operator to come and build a content-suited data centres near the POI. That's not in our remit.

Tom.




From: Michael Kahl [mailto:michael at kahl.id.au] 
Sent: Thursday, 20 December, 2012 12:12 AM
To: Tom Sykes
Cc: Joseph Goldman; ausnog at lists.ausnog.net
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] ubiquitous peering

There may be benefits to peering within an NBN POI at some stage in the future if full end to end connectivity is restored (no NAT) or if there's a peer to peer "killer app" that dramatically changes traffic patterns, but for now even for the biggest players I'm guessing the traffic levels would make it difficult to even justify the port costs of peering within a POI, let alone buying cross connects, rackspace, etc.

What seems really shortsighted of the NBN is that there's basically no provision for directly serving content to the end user out of the POI, and looking at most of the sites even if the NBN wanted to allow it they're going to be severely limited by lack of power and space with the sites they've chosen.

This might not be a huge issue today in Australia seeing as there's very limited options available for streaming HD content, but it's only a matter of time. What happens when we have a Netflix available over here? Or even when Foxtel work out that broadcasting content is a thing of the past and people want the content they pay for available when they want it, ie streaming on demand. 

In the US the CDN's are already pushing into the local exchanges to keep up with the growing demand, but what happens next here? Is NBN confident in its bet that we won't need local content in the network that it says will be getting us through the next 50 years?


On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 6:52 PM, Tom Sykes <tomsykes at nbnco.com.au> wrote:
This is one of the reasons why we are installing a series of RSP co-location racks in all the POIs (I.e to enable someone to setup a peering point of they wished. We understand traffic volumes today may not necessarily justify it just yet though)


Regards
Tom Sykes
NBN Co Limited


On 19/12/2012, at 5:43 PM, "Joseph Goldman" <joe at apcs.com.au> wrote:

> The problem seems as you suggest, having full L3 gear at each POI, possible for some, not for others who would probably rather L2 link it straight back to a more central POP.
>
> However the idea has merit, I believe Adam Internet do a similar thing with their ADSL2+ Infrastructure in South Australia. I only read a little bit about it but I believe it is what you are talking about (exchange based peering) but they control it in the sense of having a community server in that area (newsgroups or DC or <other p2p protocol>. I can't seem to find much info on it now though.
>
>
> On 19/12/12 5:38 PM, Jake Anderson wrote:
>> So I was wondering and the list seems quiet.
>> With P2P content (games, skype etc not just torrents) soaking a decent amount of traffic, and the NBN having relatively few "exchanges" if you will, I wonder about the possibility of peering at that level.
>>
>> IE within each POI everybody sees if the traffic actually needs to leave said POI.
>> Presumably routers and such would need to be configured automatically but I wonder how much of a gain there would be from it.
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