[AusNOG] Why is peering in Australia so hard?

[Mark ZZZ Smith]

I think it could be a symptom of a few differences between Australia and other regions.

Australia has a small number of large cities, spread apart by 100s of Kms. As a consequence, there are only a small number of IXes in each city, and the network effect (the more something is used, the more valuable it becomes), keeps that number of IXes small. If you're going to connect to an interstate IX, you need to be large enough to afford that sort of infrastructure (e.g, be able to afford to pay for a reasonable bandwidth link that goes 100s of Kms), and you're going to go to the most popular IX(es) to gain the best value from peering.

Once you connect to an IX, multilateral peering with a couple of the IX's route servers provides more value than bilaterally peering in most cases, because you avoid the administrative overhead of all those bilateral peering setups. 

To be worth doing, bilateral peering would need to either provide a peering with somebody who won't multilateral peer at an IX, or peering that provides more useful value than what the existing multilateral peering provides.

Regards,
Mark.





>________________________________
> From: Shaun McGuane <shaun at rackcentral.com.au>
>To: Tom Paseka <tom at cloudflare.com>; Wolfgang Nagele <wolfgang.nagele at ausregistry.com.au> 
>Cc: "Ausnog at ausnog.net" <Ausnog at ausnog.net> 
>Sent: Sunday, 4 August 2013 3:16 AM
>Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Why is peering in Australia so hard?
> 
>
>
> 
>Hi Guys,
> 
>I just wanted to chime in here … We are peering with Wolfgang and set it up last week. 
>We are all for peering .. and if anyone wants to reach out and peer with us we have gear/pop in the following locations.
> 
>530 Collins St (MDF / & MDC Level 15 )
>525 Collins St (MDF Rialto Towers)
>NextDC M1
>Primus DC Melbourne
>Vocus Doody St Sydney
> 
>Regards
>Shaun McGuane
> 
> 
>From:AusNOG [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Tom Paseka
>Sent: Sunday, 4 August 2013 3:01 AM
>To: Wolfgang Nagele
>Cc: Ausnog at ausnog.net
>Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Why is peering in Australia so hard?
> 
>Wolfgang,
> 
>Australia isn't opposed to peering any more or less so than Europe. Difference is many operators wont set up direct sessions over the fabric, instead relying on peering with the Route Server(s) to exchange routes. 
> 
>Cheers,
>Tom
> 
>On Sat, Aug 3, 2013 at 7:24 AM, Wolfgang Nagele <wolfgang.nagele at ausregistry.com.au> wrote:
>Hi,
>> 
>>Coming from Europe I have to say that I am still surprised about the reluctance in Australia to peer with each other. Leaving the large players and their various (mainly) political motives aside, why the reluctance among the small providers here?
>> 
>>To put it into perspective, we've just recently rolled out a substantial global Anycast deployment and while we are struggling to get decent numbers of peers at various IXes here we've established many in both Europe and the US.
>> 
>>Anybody can shed some light on this issue for me?
>> 
>>And for those that actually just would like to peer - our details are here: http://as58620.peeringdb.com
>> 
>>Regards,
>> 
>>--
>>Wolfgang Nagele
>>IT Manager
>>AusRegistry Pty Ltd
>>Level 8, 10 Queens Road
>>Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 3004
>>Phone +61 3 9866 3710
>>Email: wolfgang.nagele at ausregistry.com.au
>>Web: www.ausregistry.com.au
>> 
>> 
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