Hi,
Much has been bandied around in conversation over the past few months
regarding the possibility of establishing a neutral peering point in
Auckland.
Some points/ideas which have been discussed are:
+ Location - a recurring idea seems to be the Sky Tower, which is well
served by CLEAR and Telecom fibre, and is a good high point for
exchange participants who want to haul bits back to their Auckland
PoP using unlicenced spread-spectrum radio/DMR. To the best of my
knowledge, nobody has approached Sky City about this (yet);
+ Infrastructure - experiences elsewhere show that a L2 exchange is
preferable over a L3 one -- i.e. the exchange infrastructure should
be no more than a (switched) layer-2 fabric over which exchange
participants can negotiate their own IP-layer arrangements;
+ Legal/financial - Craig Holmes of Telstra has experience in building
(legal) frameworks for international under-sea cable landing, and
has confidence that something similar can be set up for internet
peering in Auckland;
+ Sponsorship - Various vendors have expressed an interest in contributing
equipment to form the layer-2 exchange fabric;
+ Agreements - in general, bilateral peering arrangements between
individual exchange participants are far more flexible (and far easier
to manage/find agreement on) than multilateral exchange-wide peering
policies;
+ Route exchange - by BGP4 through individual bilateral peering arrangements
(no route server). Publication of policy is up to individual
participants, although a central repository (e.g. in the RADB) might
make automated filter generation simpler;
+ IP Addressing - Bill Manning of ISI has address space available to
number exchanges which meet his criteria; this address space would
not lie within supernet advertisements of any particular exchange
participant, which makes it easy for the route to the exchange network
to not be advertised outside NZ;
+ Operational policy and support - initially at least, best effort, no
uptime guarantees; nobody should _depend_ on the exchange fabric for
business-critical traffic, but should consider the fact that it works
a bonus -- this is all in the interests of getting something working
quickly without getting bogged down in service level agreements.
This _is_ the Internet, after all :)
+ Communication - through the NZNOG list, unless people object (in which
case we can start another list, somewhere else if necessary);
+ Measurement - none. If participants are interested in traffic statistics
across the exchange, they can sort something out privately;
+ Privacy - "no snooping the ether". "No messing with other peoples' gear".
Note that at this stage no decisions have been made, and these are all just
ideas. If there is sufficient support, there would seem to be nothing on
this list that couldn't be sorted out in the next few months.
This message is a request for involvement for any networking organisation
who has interest in participating in an exchange of public IP traffic in
Auckland.
Organisations which have expressed an interest in Auckland peering (in
one form or another, at some point in time, not authoritative, in no
particular order, no flames please ;) include:
CLEAR
ICONZ
NetGate
Xtra
IBM NZ
Iprolink
Telstra NZ
Compass
Voyager
NetLink
KC
I presume there are more. Stand up and be counted!
Joe
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