Commenting as someone with a little exposure to both IXs and CDNs At 09:52 a.m. 13/11/2014, Ewen McNeill wrote:
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.)
That was the primary aim of WIX - local traffic. Brian Reid from DEC described networks as the canals of the modern era and IXs as the Market Square. I haven't checked for a while, but looking at APE and WIX, WIX used to have the greater number of peers, the biggest number were non-network operators. So that means they're probably not visible to ISPs. But for B2B traffic WIX is huge. Any one noticed there aren't as many cycle-couriers as there used to be ? When at CityLink we did try and build a lot more regional IXs - not for ISP traffic but for local business traffic. Part of the "survey" was to walk the streets of a town and look at the businesses. The recent economic discussion about regional NZ shows why regional IXs haven't been a big success. Places I looked at were CHC Nelson Masterton Wanganui Levin Hastings/Napier So for most regional towns and cities, they will be consumers of content, rather than generators. With CDNs, over the past few years I have changed how I work. I moved off NZ based CDNs as they are too small and the peering issues weren't going to be addressed. I now use one of the big 4-5, with POPs in 40+ locations globally. This is for a number of reasons. I need multiple ingest points I need world class stats and support I need world class services I have a global audience. As an observation, for On-demand content, NZ is about 50% of the audience or less, for an average month. For live content we always get an international audience - it used to be 10% but is nearer 20% now and the number of countries is large. 50 is not unusual We also have to produce more bit rates and formats. So we analyse the connecting device and have player pages for all of them. Netflix do this well and on average produce around 30 versions of each movie. For live, I'm generally producing anywhere from 10 to 20 different bit-rates/versions/formats for each programme feed. We do use cloud processing as well, and also cloud based signal routing. We hand pick the best data centers for this based on their physical and network location. The aim is reducing IP hop count and congested areas. More IXs will be interesting. From an ISP point of view it may have some advantages. From a producers point of view, I note the CDNs are often in more than one IX in a city/region. My interest is in the CDN operators being in as many global locations as possible. I still run servers in NZ and they peer on WIX. They don't need to as all the content comes off the CDN now. My servers are mainly for signal routing now. But please be aware IXs are not just for ISPs. There was a group that was looking at VoIP peering. Sadly it went nowhere. When WIX was first looked at (1997-98) it was Wellington Information Exchange and we looked at ATM switches so we could have E1 peering - for phones and video. Alan Dempster (dec) and John Heard, will remember this. Richard