[news] Internet 2 Quilt Project to promote small ISP peering at GigaPOPs (fwd)

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Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2003 15:40:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: [email protected]
Subject: [news] Internet 2 Quilt Project to promote small ISP peering at
    GigaPOPs

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[Some excerpts from ISP Planet article - BSA]

http://www.isp-planet.com/business/2003/quilt.html


Small ISPs yearning to offer more services now can now do
so if they are lucky enough to be located next to any of the
22 GigaPOPs that are a part of The Quilt.
  =20

The Quilt is not widely known in the ISP community as it is
a non-profit organization funded by the University
Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID),
better known as the leader of Internet 2 project which links
202 university, corporate, and government partners with a
network that is supposed to be a prototype of the next
generation of the Internet. The Quilt, with a budget of
$300,000 a year, is a cross between a volunteer research
project, a lobbying group with consolidated buying power,
and a forum aimed at exchanging business practices between
educational and non-profit Internet 2 participants
representing their common interests to commercial partners.

These interests span a range of topics, but concentrate in
the areas of comparing and managing national network
facilities; buying bandwidth in bulk; peering and fostering
regional fiber development.

Membership in The Quilt is open to GigaPOPs that have four
or more connections to Internet 2. Most such GigaPOPs appear
to be in rural areas where many university campuses are, and
they face many of the issues that rural ISPs face=97lack of
networking infrastructure and limited bargaining power with
large vendors.

The Quilt is helping its members to address these issues.
One of the projects run within the organization deals with
local municipalities and their plans to build metropolitan
fiber networks that third parties would then lease. Another
project aids participating members to use their collective
bargaining power to get better deals. This last effort has
already resulted in cheaper bandwidth contracts since
together The Quilt participants are buying 22 Gbps worth a
bandwidth per month.

However, it is the peering project that makes The Quilt
visible and its efforts meaningful for the local ISP
community. Some of the GigaPOPs that are part of The Quilt
are acting as local peering exchanges, engaging local
carriers, Internet 2 participants, and national players.

The idea behind local peering is pretty straightforward.
Since quite a few end users are researchers, academics, and
students, many are telecommuting. GigaPOPs that act as local
peering points establish direct connectivity with major
backbones and in effect keep a lot of this traffic local,
shaving off milliseconds off end users' packets round trips
and lowering long haul bandwidth utilization for broadband
providers.

"Local ISPs participating can typically justify the cost of
joining the peering exchange with bandwidth savings, and
many gain the differentiation of better than incumbent
carrier quality of service," notes Peter Kruckenberg, a
peering coordinator with Intermountain GigaPOP and a member
with The Quilt's peering group.

Participating in a local peering exchange like this costs
about $300 per month, Kruckenberg says, and this is about
how much ISPs save in long haul bandwidth costs, since
buying a peered connection saves about 1 Mb of bandwidth per
month. The effect of better-peered connectivity is instantly
seen by those end users who have high bandwidth high latency
requirements=97such as online gamers. Another less widely used
application that is visibly impacted is streaming video.

The fact that peering points are popping up in the locales
that previously had little in terms of networking
infrastructure is not lost on other constituencies around
GigaPOPs. In Utah, where Intermountain GigaPOP is located,
state officials and municipalities building fiber started to
pay attention to peering. Internet infrastructure is now
seen as aiding economic development, a discovery that city
fathers in big cities like Miami and New York have made
already.

"Having an exchange point is like having a railroad stop in
your town=97without it the infrastructure is not complete,"
claims Kruckenberg.

Even though Intermountain GigaPOP and other facilities
participating in the peering projects are making good
strides towards establishing better peering in the regions
typically shunned by commercial operators of peering points,
they have their challenges. One is financial=97most of the
staff are volunteers who believe that this non-profit
activity allows them to improve the quality of their job.

The other challenge has to do with explaining the concept of
regional peering to major providers. Most large peering
contracts are established on the national level, and
explaining how local peering would impact national peering
sometimes can get overwhelming for all parties involved.
While The Quilt participants understand that theirs is not
the only peering game in town, they feel they are not losing
anything by making their voice heard.

"There are still a lot of things to be determined [with
peering], and the Quilt represents one perspective," says
Kruckenberg.


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