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 --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog