[AusNOG] Why is peering in Australia so hard?

Sun Aug 4 16:56:24 EST 2013

True, but those small ISPs are single homed and will have quite simple
setups. Indeed a cross connect or worst case some fiber interconnect might
be relatively cheap, but peering requires talking BGP and that for a start
requires more expensive gear (lol @ megaport $500/month for 10G, cheap on
OPEX sure but a single fiber module will cost you a years worth of peering,
and a router another 5-20yrs so the CAPEX is the issue there), and then the
engineering side. I know a few small ISPs that run a bunch of l2/l3
services at a fairly reasonable scale, but with a grand total of 2
networking guys max per ISP, and across all of them only a couple of CCNAs
or similar at best.

Anyway, playing devils advocate here, personally if I was an ISP beyond
ICT/SOHO levels (so say 10k customers), I'd definitely have a national
network and probably be selling more than just DSL tail products, but
onselling interconnects to other similar/smaller ISPs who don't want to do
it themselves, and peering would play a massive role in that. I think
Megaport has mostly the right idea, especially with the free for 6 months
part, but to reach the ISPs with only a handleful of staff and maybe only 1
who knows what BGP even is... well that is more of an education and sales
thing than aforementioned technical/cost reasons.

On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 4:41 PM, Cameron Daniel <cdaniel at nurve.com.au> wrote:

> For most service provider networks, peering in at least one location is
> very achievable. The small networks you mention are generally set up in
> well-connected locations so they can pick up their DSL tails/transit
> cheaply. These locations typically have at least one IX present.
>
> The cost of peering, assuming you have the ports available and meet the
> bandwidth requirements to make it commercially viable (ie. very little),
> comes down to operational expense. It's an extra "thing" that needs
> monitoring and some occasional attention from the engineering team/person.
>
> Assuming the cost of peering is less than the cost of a transit port, it's
> almost always a good idea. The barrier for entry to an IX isn't as high as
> some people seem to think.
>
>
> On 2013-08-04 4:16 pm, Joshua D'Alton wrote:
>
>> And just adding to that, the scale you have in EU/US is 10-100x what
>> you have here. So we might have... well hundreds of ISPs and a few
>> thousand AS#, but where the 100th largest in Europe will have multiple
>> PoPs with carrier grade equipment and at least 10 network engineers
>> and doing 50Gbit+ traffic, the 100th network here in Australia is 1
>> PoP, 2 engineers at best and doing a few hundred Mbit at best, so its
>> not really cost effective to consider peering, or even practical. The
>> vast majority of AU networks (ASn or not) are single homed to begin
>> with, let alone thinking about peering.
>>
>> On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Wolfgang Nagele
>> <wolfgang.nagele at ausregistry.**com.au<wolfgang.nagele at ausregistry.com.au>>
>> wrote:
>>
>>  Hi Mark,
>>>
>>> The only difference that I can agree to is the distance between
>>> major cities. All the rest is the same in every market around the
>>> world. In my mind the vast distances between major cities should
>>> make the case for peering even stronger. Also as far as distance and
>>> availability of IXes goes Australia is not that much different from
>>> the US. Most peering in the US is carried out at the West and East
>>> coast - same as in Australia.
>>>
>>> I did receive a reply off-list that pointed out what I believe may
>>> be the real reason for the difference in peering culture. In
>>> Australia the Internet did not start with small ISPs all over the
>>> place - it started with the Incumbent. That makes for a very
>>> different dynamic around market control.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Wolfgang
>>>
>>> On 8/4/13 9:40 AM, "Mark ZZZ Smith" <markzzzsmith at yahoo.com.au>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> 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<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<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<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 [1]
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 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<wolfgang.nagele at ausregistry.com.au>
>>>
>>> Web: www.ausregistry.com.au [2]
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>> Links:
>> ------
>> [1] http://as58620.peeringdb.com/
>> [2] http://www.ausregistry.com.au/
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>> [4] http://www.rackcentral.com.au
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