Re: What is a regional exchange point?

I'll take a stab at it. 

Please forgive the deletion of previous comments and a statement as
opposed to agreement/disagreements with quoted text can become confusing
(at least to me)

While it is true that all exchange points cover a certain geographic
region area (if Worldcom was not doing business in the San Francisco Bay
area, it is unlikely they would participate at Bay Area exchanges, for
example) Certain exhange points have become ubiquitous in having the
national players present, such as the MAE's, PAIX's, etc.

The need/niche I see the "Regional" exchange points filling the gaps in
the middle.

In Reno, for example, where the aptly named "RENOIX" is, there are still
several "regional" ISPs, who are happy as clams to sell SBC DSL to their
customers, host the web sites of local businesses.

The problem we found is that even though we (ATG) were well connected to
both peers and transit providers, we were often 7-12 hops from service
providers in the same building.   The latency and hop count were causing
problems as customers were switching their transit to us, all of the
sudden their favorite local web site loaded half as quickly.

While ATG was successful signing some of the incumbent ISPs up as
customers, several more preferred their existing arrangements.

RenoIX was founded on the notion that what's best for the customers is
paramount, and for ATG's customers, it was best if they were two hops
from the neighborhood web host than twelve, 

So at least for RenoIX the differences are:

1> Most participants are physically local to the exchange as their
primary business location.
2> Most participants are not connected to any other EP
3> Most participants to not have networks that extend outside of the
region.
4> As a result, 90+% of the traffic exchanged in the REP does not leave
that regional area.

Thanks for reading my ramblings, feel free to tear them to shreds as
desired.

-S



-- 
Scott Call
Reno Internet Exchange, Reno, NV	http://www.renoix.net