[AusNOG] Why is peering in Australia so hard?

[Ben]

On Sun, Aug 04, 2013 at 10:20:44AM +0000, Wolfgang Nagele wrote:
>    Hi,
> 
>      The PIPE IX in Adelaide (the middle of Australia) had 97% of the routes
>      that were available at all the other bigger interstate IXes in around
>      2008/2009. Very little value at the time in paying for fat intercapital
>      links when you're going to be shifting less than 10Mbps per interstate
>      IX off of your transit.
> 
>    In our case most of our content is sitting in Melbourne. I certainly
>    cannot get 97% of the routes that I can get in Sydney down here in
>    Melbourne via public exchanges. Due to that we push a lot of traffic via
>    Sydney to return back to Melbourne to some home DSL line. At least an
>    additional 15ms RTT and a waste of resources on our and the recipients
>    network. If you or your upstreams in Adelaide follow the same principle
>    peering approach you will see a very similar situation - nobody wins.

The same thing happens in the US, especially places like Kansas, Tampa, Michigan
etc that have got reasonable amount of population but aren't really transit hubs.

There's no international cables in Melbourne, and most content providers are in
Sydney rather than Melbourne - if you're pulling content from the US, then Sydney
will have lower latency for cache misses.

One solution for CDN like content is to use anycast, and have peering only to it,
and run the main content out of the US where transit is cheaper.

Depending on what it is 15 msec shouldn't matter too much, but there's also an
increased chance of issues along the way.  In the US there's also limited peering
points between some peers leading to things like going San Jose -> Los Angeles ->
San Jose which also adds about 15 msec or so latency.  Sure they're both in California
but they're not adjacent, and it doesn't help when there's peering exchanges like Any2IX
Coresite that let people be peered at either one and bridge connections between the two.

A lot of providers are likely to have considerable national backbones between Melbourne
and Sydney because they need it for going international, and so there's the cost of being
at an extra location, with mostly a performance difference rather than a cost cutting
difference.

That said if you can get cheap backhaul from Melbourne to Sydney, and just offload the
traffic there for peering, then there's no real incentive to pay extra to get more direct
connections to Melbourne DSL users.  DSL is going to be high latency anyway, and some providers
could be weary of throwing all of their routes out in Melbourne even if they do share Melbourne
routes in Melbourne.

Ben.