Re: Transit SLA

Hrybyk, Michael wrote:
> We promote purchase of transit at our 3 exchanges in British Columbia. 
> In fact, the exchanges are set up for transit first (use of ethernet
> VLANs, but possibly virtual routers in the future), and peering second ...

TorIX (Toronto) discourages transit over the exchange, and offers no SLA
to cover it.  There is a move toward SLA availability, but TorIX started
out as a "best effort" exchange.

All of the players are in the same colo facility, so private
interconnects are less of a problem than they could be, though
interconnect fees can be annoying.

> Consumers purchase a local loop to the exchange, and it is presumed
> there is an SLA associated with this. Transit suppliers deliver their
> service FOB the exchange.  
>  ...
> The consumer needs three contracts, and that is a fair number of hoops
> to jump through, which is why it only makes sense to date for those
> wishing to multihome.  

Multihomed through a single local loop?  For redundancy, I've always
leaned toward using upstreams who share no infrastructure and are
barely even talking to each other.  Definitely a link to an exchange
is a good thing, but a second loop going elsewhere makes the backhoe
work harder.

-- 
Anthony de Boer