[NNagain] The Whys of the Wichita IXP Project

[Dave Cohen]

I think this landscape is changing. These days I’m only focused on a couple of specific markets, but in those markets we are seeing both 1) a proliferation of IXs either adding nodes in new facilities or getting connectivity out to them to provide at least some capability and 2) datacenter providers, particularly more large-deployment-oriented facilities, seeking to attract IXPs in their sites or drive connectivity out to them as part of their own connectivity offerings. I believe that some of this dynamic is driven by transit simply being so cheap that it’s hard for carriers to justify rapidly expanding their footprints at the rate that datacenters themselves are expanding and some of it that larger enterprises are more willing to add IX connectivity to their Internet mix than they were in the days of everyone being extremely ratio-sensitive.

Dave Cohen
craetdave at gmail.com

> On Feb 22, 2024, at 6:31 PM, Bill Woodcock via Nnagain <nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
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>> On Feb 22, 2024, at 19:58, rjmcmahon via Nnagain <nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> Boston University spent $305M on this and it doesn't have an IXP.
>> https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/center-for-computing-and-data-sciences-photo-essay/
>> It's like building a magnificent train station w/o any tracks to/fro the station.
> 
> Most datacenters don’t contain IXPs, and most IXPs aren’t located in datacenters.  It’s very financially advantageous for a neutral multi-tenant datacenter to contain an IXP, but generally much less advantageous for an IXP to be located in a datacenter.  Datacenters tend to concentrate content, but that content can be transported to an IXP over just a few strands of fiber.  Whereas eyeballs have to be physically aggregated, and that’s over thousands of strands, so the average distance to eyeballs matters, whereas the average distance to content just doesn’t have a significant multiplier on it, and the content is portable anyway.  The optimum location for an IXP is in a city center, whereas the optimum location for a datacenter (all political, zoning, and real-estate factors considered) is typically in an industrial park well outside the city core.
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> Lots of organizations need a datacenter for their own use, and universities are typical in that.  It doesn’t mean that they’d make sense as locations for an IXP, unless they’re also aggregating a lot of eyeball fiber for some reason.
> 
>                                -Bill
> 
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