Transcript No Slide Title

Peering Points:
Status & Futures
Keith Mitchell
Chief Technical Officer,
XchangePoint
Internet Peering Points: IPP or IXP or NAP
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Differences in European & American IPP models
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Growth trends
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Technologies
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Some issues
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XchangePoint’s business model
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XchangePoint’s architecture
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IPP futures
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Summary
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Internet Peering Point Overview
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Multiple ISPs locate backbone nodes in single building operated by
co-location provider
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In-building connections to shared interconnect fabric using ethernet
LAN switching technology
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IPP operator need not be same organization as co-location provider
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CoLo will generally have other customers:
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carriers, hosting, ASPs, content distributors
In North America, IPPs generally operated by:
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neutral CoLo providers
non-neutral telcos
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Peering Points in Europe
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In Europe, IPPs generally operated by:
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Most countries have at least one
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mainly to keep domestic traffic inside country
Top 5 exchanges
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academic/public sector network operators (historically)
not-for-profit membership organizations (increasingly)
keep European traffic inside Europe
London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Frankfurt, Paris
50-100 ISP participants each
switch typically several hundred Mb/s to several Gb/s traffic
Not in general congested
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Growth in IPPs
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Only ~3 each in Europe, North America back in 1994
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Now nearly 60 across Europe, many more in US
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In GB, we have 7:
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Multiple IPPs within same city are now competing for same market
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though more than 2 or 3 IPPs per city is not useful
Also bandwidth brokers now doing IP
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London: LINX, LoNAP, XchangePoint, UK6X
Manchester: MaNAP
Edinburgh: Scot-IX, World-IX
e.g. Band-X, RateXchange
Some CoLo providers have said they want to operate an IPP themselves
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IPP Governance Trends
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More IPPs are hiring dedicated staff
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Increasingly open membership as definition of
“what is an ISP ?” becomes more blurred
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Some calls for statutory regulation of IP traffic exchange
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Improved co-ordination between IPPs
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RIPE EIX working group
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regular updates to ISPs at RIPE meetings
has defined switch vendor feature wish-list
www.euro-ix.net
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pan-European association of IPP operators
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Growth in IPP Traffic
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Traffic statistics gathered at IPPs are often best place to measure Internet
traffic trends
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Confirm underlying trend of traffic doubling every 4-6 months for past decade
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But, some evidence of reduction in this to 1-year doubling period recently
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I believe this is not due to any reduction in traffic growth, rather increasing
bypass of IPPs by inter-ISP private interconnects
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More growth in private peering in Europe than North America currently
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IPP Technologies
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Most public exchanges have been based on Ethernet technology:
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Non-blocking Ethernet switches now widely and cheaply available
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e.g. Extreme, Foundry
Some exchanges ATM based:
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10base2, 10baseT, 100baseT, 1000baseSX
e.g. PARIX, SBC Chicago & Stockton NAPs
but ATM is hitting the 2.4Gb/s barrier
generally more expensive per Mb/s capacity
Increasing use of metro-area connections (usually dark fiber) between
different co-lo providers hosting distributed nodes of same IPP
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Some issues with many existing Peering Points
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Membership/Academic Exchanges:
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Weak Incumbent Organisation Structures
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Inadequate Funding Structures
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Lack of Resilience
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Slow and/or inflexible Response
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Single Country/City/CoLo
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Restrictive Membership Rules
Telco Operated Exchanges:
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Lack of neutrality
Poor reputation amongst US ISPs in particular
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What we are doing
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XchangePoint is building and operating:
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Well funded
Neutral
State of the art
Well managed
High capacity and performance
Reliable
Open
Flexible, responsive and customer-focussed
Internet Peering Point (IPP) services in 5-10 European cities in the
next 3+ years
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Architecture Overview
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Present at 3 co-location sites per city
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Dark fiber metro ring connecting all sites in city
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2 “Core” sites per city
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10 racks
2 or more “Basic” sites per city
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3-5 racks
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DWDM equipment at all sites
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Gigabit Ethernet between switches and sites
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10-Gigabit capable
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Ethernet Switches
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2 Extreme Black Diamond 6808i switches at Core sites
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2 Extreme Alpine 3804 switches at Basic sites
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Each switch at each site connected to one of two separate
wavelength overlay networks
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Virtual dual-vendor approach
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different code on each overlay network’s switches
Dual overlay networks connect at Core nodes
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maximum flexibility for high bandwidth interconnect within Core
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DWDM Advantages
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Bandwidth multiplication
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Provides extra resilience
optical circuit protection around ring
 or use inter-switch trunking for each ring path
 faster fail-over than spanning tree
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New services
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Inter-site Private Interconnect
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Improves scalability
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Permits multiple logical topologies over single physical MAN
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Can conserve switched bandwidth
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DWDM Configuration
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ADVA system supports 32 protected wavelengths () per fiber ring
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Initial configuration 8:
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Later configurations will exploit multiplexing capability of ADVA
equipment:
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3 for inter-switch backbone connections
1 for R&D/test (e.g. dedicated multicast overlay)
4 can provide up to 12 unprotected private interconnects
up to 8x1 Gigabit channels per 10G 
also sub-gigabit private interconnect
Remaining  can be used to increase backbone or PI capacity in 1G
or 10G increments
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Private Interconnect
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Copper and Fiber cross-connect available as a service within sites
Can dedicate single DWDM /channel to private interconnect between
two high-volume peering customers
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Gigabit ethernet; also STM-4, STM-16 options
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Protected and unprotected options
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-interconnect targetted between ISPs only
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use within a customer’s backbone possible, but we want to maintain our
neutrality and avoid competing with conventional carrier business
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Build Status
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London network complete, live,
ready for service !
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Redbus Interhouse
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Harbour Exchange in London
Telehouse London:
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Nodes in both North and East
buildings
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Global Switch London
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Redbus Paris planned Q4 2001
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Frankfurt planned 2001/2
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Redbus Interhouse Core Node
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Telehouse East & North Nodes
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Service Level Agreement Commitments
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Service provision within 10 days of order
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Response to 24x7 customer support requests
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Availability: 99.97%
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Packet loss:
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Lower level of 99.9% for single-homed customers and unprotected
circuits
0% within single site
0.05% between sites
Rebates for failure to perform
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Acceptable Use Policy
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Designed to:
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Main principles:
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nature of traffic and commercial terms are purely bi-lateral matter for
peers
don’t do anything that affects other customers adversely
More constraints for public peering than private interconnect
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be minimally restrictive
protect customers and infrastructure from malice/accidents
e.g. AS number and PI address space needed for public peering
“Non-standard” traffic addressed in SLA rather than AUP
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Future Services
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Multicast traffic exchange needs more switch vendor support:
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IPv6
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probably not needed for customer ports until end 2002
Inter-ISP Voice over IP
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mostly just addressing, IPP allocation issues hopefully resolved
10G Ethernet between switches 2001 Q4
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e.g. separate Foundry or Cisco network
what are the interconnect issues ?
2.5G and 3G mobile operators
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GPRS and UMTS have their own flavor of IP
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Future Technologies
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Mainly these offer new and better ways of switching traffic
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Various approaches to integrating optical and packet switching
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Cisco DPT / RPR / IEEE 802.17
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Resilient Packet Ring
Combines advantages of FDDI, SDH, WDM at 10Gbps speeds
MPS
 use of MPLS experimental only for IPPs - this is even more so
Various proprietary offerings
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Summary
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IPPs are alive and evolving
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Internet traffic growth is not going to go away
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Effective IPPs are one of our best solutions to this
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Some interesting new technologies becoming available
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Increasingly competitive market
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Governance and Commercial models undergoing important evolution
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Contact Details
CTO:
Keith Mitchell
Web:
www.xchangepoint.net
Presentation:
www.xchangepoint.net/info/Xchange-main.ppt
E-mail:
[email protected]
Phone:
+44 20 7592 0370
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