Re: [nznog] New IXs in NZ - discussion

Ewen,

On Nov 12, 2014, at 12:52 PM, Ewen McNeill wrote:

On 13/11/14 9:31, Dave Mill wrote:

...

[...] I think WIX just isn’t worth the money when we have alternate ways to/from all WIX peers already - sorry Wellington! [And "home base" is outside Wellington]

As someone based in Wellington, I'd like to note that the ability to get traffic from one location in Wellington to another location in Wellington, without paying an 1800km speed-of-light penalty (ie, round trip to/from Auckland) is definitely a consideration in ISP choice. (It's particularly noticeable when doing interactive work, especially as the intercity links get more congested and there's some packet loss.) Agreed, and it would be disappointing if the WIX was abandoned by New Zealand ISPs for sure. It’s important to have that there, not least of which because we’ve seen NZ get segmented between Wellington and Auckland on at least one provider due to multiple cable cuts in the last decade.

In your (Dave's) case, as a practical matter it seems to me there's little practical difference (for users) between "buying inter-city layer 2 to be on WIX" and "buying layer 3 transit which includes advertising onto WIX" -- assuming adequate capacity available (which it sounds like you have). As we all know, the BGP path selection process places some weight on as-path length, so it be interesting to see how that does work out - I suspect (particularly with bi-lats, which most providers prefer over route-server learned routes), a bit of engineering will be required to ensure balancing between the two points is correctly done. So I’m not sure that l2/l3 to these IXs is necessarily same/same.

But much as I understand why "most" of the peering in New Zealand happens in Auckland, and as Tim points out most CDN/content providers are going to locate in Auckland if they're in the country at all -- and applaud them doing so, as Auckland is noticeably closer than Sydney! -- I also think it'd be unfortunate if Auckland were to become the _only_ place where traffic was exchanged. Absolutely. I think we have to view WIX as a place for NZ content/ISPs to be, vs APE/AKL-IX/MegaportAKL as the place for both exchange of traffic between providers + access to content. And yes - we must remember that this is a massive improvement over Sydney!

Having said this, there are many locations with far more users than the population of NZ in the US which are further from most content than Christchurch is from Auckland, so it’s important to remember that even if we do get some level of tromboning up to Auckland, it’s not _that_ bad :).

Both from a latency point of view (3000km round trips, from eg, down the South Island to Auckland, is even worse than Wellington), and also from an equality-of-opportunity point of view: if all traffic is exchanged in Auckland, any ISP (and potentially customer) based outside of Auckland is at a disadvantage in needing to buy more expensive backhaul to their base. This is an interesting point. I wonder if there are any regional ISPs on list (particularly in the South Island) who could comment on how materially this actually affects their business models?

So... geographically it seems inevitable that most traffic will be exchanged in Auckland. But I'd still like to encourage exchanges outside of Auckland. And ISPs to have some presence on them -- even if it's just a layer 3 "all exchanges" transit product, where it doesn't make sense to be there "at layer 2" (colo, or dedicated backhaul bandwidth). Agreed. And if this is the outcome we get to, with good redundancy regionally in New Zealand, plus good redundancy across multiple IXs in Auckland to the content, we’ve done well :).

—Hoff

Ewen

_______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog