______________________________________________________________________

DRAFT TRANSCRIPT

SIG:           IX
Date:          Thursday 2 March 2006
Time:          2.00pm

Presentation:  IXP panel discussion - world IXP forum: testing the 
               waters
Presenter:     Serge Radovcic
			       
______________________________________________________________________


PHILIP SMITH:


OK the final item on the agenda for this session is the exchange
point panel discussion. Serge is going to lead that. Che-Hoo and I
are going to move off the podium.

SERGE RADOVCIC:

I think there's four or five of you that know you should be sitting
up here. You don't need laptops or anything.

Kurtis actually won the prize.

OK. Thanks, Phil. When Phil sent out the call for presentations,
one of the topics that he had was IXP collaboration. I thought,
well, that's pretty interesting to me and I didn't notice else put
their hand up so I thought maybe I could attempt something here.

I guess one thing I want to make clear from the start is I've got
these five guys up here representing - "representing" - five different
continents but most of what they're going to say is their personal
opinions unless they express otherwise, so I don't think anyone
should be held to what they say. I'm looking to do an informal
discussion to see where we might go from all this and is it something
we want to do. I wanted to say that at the start.

OK, I had a bit of a look through the APNIC archives and I came
along this quote which I thought was a good way to start it. I think
it was during - a few years ago, I don't know who said it but I
thought it was a good way to start it up. I don't know where it
came from but I think it works well here. I want to introduce my
panel first. This is pretty much the order that I'm going to ask
the panel to talk about the regions in. Bill, German, Adiel, and
Kurtis and Gaurab. And you can see which regions they'll be talking
about (refers to slide). How much time have we got?

PHILIP SMITH:

28 minutes.

SERGE RADOVCIC:

I want to quickly talk about what collaboration is. Then we're going
to go through a tour of the world, what is going on in the five
regions around the world and then an open discussion about where
we think we might want things to go.

What is collaboration? I've got a couple of definitions. The first
one I came across was this one. I wasn't sure if this is what you
were talking about or not. (Slide reads: "traitorous cooperation
with an enemy.")

I had another look so it's definition two that we're working on
today although sometimes, through my experience in Euro-IX... yeah.

So we're looking at collaboration in the absolute broadest sense
of the word, from things that are going on as I just explained at
Euro-IX to discussions so I wanted people to keep that in mind -
we're looking at it in the broadest sense of the world.

So I'll get straight into it. We'll do a little tour of the world.
As I said, we'll start with North America. I think there's also a
portable microphone there, guys. You can give us a quick rundown
on how many IXPs there are in the region. It's on the presentation
- I hope you guys can see it. Anything specific about the IXPs in
your region and what form of collaboration in any sense of the word
is going on at the moment. So over to you, Bill.

BILL WOODCOCK:

North America has a stark division between commercial operators of
exchange facilities and non-commercial exchange facilities. To some
degree that's true everywhere but in North America it tends to be
a little bit more pronounced than most places. That has lent it
some kind of odd forms of collaboration. So instead of having
something like this forum in the US, we've got a lot of things in
which Internet Exchange, commercial operators pitch their services
to peering coordinators. So where a panel like this would be operators
of commercial exchanges and the people in the audience would, rather
than being people interested in exchange points themselves, would
be peering coordinators from ISPs and, in fact, any more, it wouldn't
be a panel with people sitting in an audience. It would be happening
on a cruise ship.

LAUGHTER

As this has sort of devolved from PAX and Equinix, each sort of
supporting, kind of contending, peering forums meet once a year, I
guess it became more than once a year each and it became a thing
where three times a year, OK. So it became too much of a hassle for
everybody, right. Nobody can go to, you know, three each of these
each year, regardless of how much vacation time they have or how
much their boss is willing to let them go do these things as part
of their jobs. So they've consolidated and I guess AMSIX and Noda
and D6 are all sort of jointly sponsoring this thing where peering
coordinators go and cruise around the Caribbean in a cruise ship
for a week or something. So I'm obviously a little bit dubious as
to the value of a week on a cruise ship instead of a week behind
the desk getting work done.

Bill will argue with me here.

BILL NORTON:

Should I do that now?

BILL WOODCOCK:

Sure. Go ahead.

BILL NORTON:

This is Bill Norton from Equinix. I understand that for peering
coordinators their job is to interact with each other. So they're
not sitting behind a desk as an alternative to doing their job.
They're actually going on this cruise to do their job face to face,
which is oftentimes much more effective than interacting with other
peering coordinators via e-mail. So that's number one. They aren't
going off on their vacation. Many of them see this as so important,
though, that they are taking vacation time in order to go on this
cruise. That's one thing.

The second thing is Josh Snowhorn actually started the initiative
of doing this on a cruise for a couple of reasons but one of which
was interesting and that is it's actually less expensive to do this
peering forum on a cruise than it is to rent a hotel with all the
catering and all the food and associated room nights and all that
kind of stuff. It's actually cheaper to do it on the cruise where
the food is already included. And the cruise liners now are bending
over backwards so that they can facilitate this business meeting,
this business interaction. So I'm just bringing this up because it
sounds like you're poo-pooing the idea as a fun cruise around the
Caribbean. And it's going to be some fun but there are also full
days of agenda here.

RANDY BUSH:

Bill, how do we become peering coordinators?

BILL WOODCOCK:

So, anyway, I say this mostly not to convey an overall large nature
of scorn, which I shouldn't and I don't need to, but to give an
idea of the tone of communication, where it's going in North America.
The fact of the matter is that we have NANOG meetings twice a year,
we have ARIN meetings twice a year. There is not really serious
discussion of Internet exchanges at those, as there is at APNIC and
at RIPE and at AfNOG and at LACNIC/NAPLA. We do have a lot of
communication about peering and very little about exchange points.
Partly that's because of the commercial nature, some degree of
commercial secrecy, the competitive nature and also the fact that
we're not really on the cutting edge of exchange point engineering
in North America in the way that, say, Seoul is, or London or
Amsterdam. We have a lot of, kind of, medium-size exchanges, where
people are not trying really to push 10 gigs through the switch too
much. We've got a few 10-gig peers in some places, the big guys are
at 10 gigs, right, nobody is doubling up or tripling up 10-gig ports
or anything like that.

So, you know, we're gradually moving from the centre of things to
becoming a backwater in terms of development of new technology and
deployment of new technology and discussion of new ideas.

So I think that's it for me.

SERGE RADOVCIC:

OK, thanks, Bill. OK, let's move now to Latin America. German.

GERMAN VALDEZ:

Regarding the effort of organisations for IXPs in Latin America,
there is an informal group called NAPLA. They have been having
meetings since 2001 and the most recent, or the most - part of the
agenda of these meetings were to experience exchange, discussing
best practices for the operation of these IXPs, reviewing procedures
of services and the organisational ways of these meetings.

Last month, from LACNIC, we started an effort to create a permanent
forum where all IXPs from Latin America be involved and can participate
and, until last month, last February, there was not any kind of way
or meeting where these organisations can experience beyond this
meeting that they had organised every year. But, after the meeting,
they lose contact and they see again the next year. The process
right now is to establish this permanent forum. They are going to
have a meeting with LACNIC in Guatemala next May. We are trying to
invite to participate the 26 IXPs that exist this the region. At
least, that's the number that we have so far. This will involve 10
countries, 10 different countries in Latin America. I highlight two
countries here, which is Cuba and Chile, which are the only IXPs
which are regulated by the government.


And one of the projects that has been discussed during this meeting
of NAPLA and are going to be discussed again in May is about regional
interconnection project. That has been the main topic in the agenda
for this meeting.

These countries which exist in IXPs are Argentina, Brazil, Chile,
Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay and Peru. It
is interesting that in Mexico there is no IXP existing within Mexico,
mostly because there is a predominant IXP which everybody is connected
with him and also ISP can connected in a cheaper way with the United
States carriers. So the deployer of an ISP in Mexico never accomplish.
I think more or less that is the situation in Latin America.

It is important also to say that NAPLA is here to learn from other
experiences. I mean, there has been some cases in South America
where they are problems in the relationship with the associations
of the IXPs because the bylaws were not very clear or some dominant
IXPs take advantage of the situation and made some movement that
was not considered fair and, in the end, people is trying to learn
and experience on other sides of the world with other colleagues
in South America, Latin America, and I think it's a very interesting
group that is pushing to have a very well organised meeting.

SERGE RADOVCIC:

OK. Thanks, German. We'll head across the waters to Africa. Adiel.

ADIEL AKPLOGAN:

The situation in Africa is not very different from Latin America.
But one thing special in Africa is that the history, or the legacy
of the Internet itself make the exchange points set up in Africa a
bit more difficult because in most of the country there was a
monopolistic telecommunications company, which tried to peer all
the new initiatives and small ISPs. But the environment is changing
very, very rapidly and there is more and more cooperation initiatives
coming in different countries in Africa and, as soon as ISP start
talking together, they start moving from this environment to something
which is more focused on, first of all, the user needs and also for
their cost and efficient use of their cost. We know that, in our
region, we have one of the most highest connection, international
transit costs.

So they start working in our region - we have about 10 Internet
Exchange points over the 54 countries and the last one was the one
set up in Mauritius two months ago. And we have received three new
requests for IX address for new exchange points also are going to
be set up. So I will say that the situation is changing.

Two things - there is the AfrISPA, the Africa ISP Association, has
done a lot by encouraging ISP associations to set up an exchange
point where there is an ISP association. So most of the country
which are running exchange points has ISP associations so that makes
it a bit more easier.

I will say also that the WSIS process somehow has helped many
countries also to start looking at Internet in another way and in
many declarations in Africa, political declarations, fortunately,
there is a goodwill to encourage exchange points in different
countries and facilitate the set-up of local traffic exchange, which
is, for me, a good thing, because politicians still have a very
powerful influence in this area in Africa. So we will expect an
evolution on exchange points in the coming years in Africa.

Last month, the board of AfriNIC has taken the decision to allow
free IP or resource allocations to exchange points which is a way
for us to support the exchange point set-up and we are also discussions
with AfrISPA to formalise a kind of coordination for the set-up in
Africa. One of the things is to set up local exchange points and
what would be the best for the region is to move one level ahead
and set up regional exchange points allowing exchange points already
set up to be connected to each other. So that we can really maximise
the international transit cost. That is all about the exchange
points in Africa and we'll see what the upcoming year give us in
that area.

SERGE RADOVCIC:

OK. Thanks, Adiel. Shall we take a little boat north, across the
Mediterranean, to Europe and let Kurtis take that.

KURT LINDQVIST:

Right. I guess Europe is maybe, I don't know, the home of some of
the exchange point corporations that started in the EIX working
group in RIPE where exchange points got together quite long back
and discussed common issues and common problems.

One of the first results of that was the opening of the switch wish
list which was setting up a list of the exchange points collaborating,
working together on which feature sets they needed for functionality
and, of course, that more or less developed into Euro-IX which,
Serge said before, through Euro-IX, the exchange points in Europe
have quite a lot of interaction with each other. We share and discuss
quite a lot of knowledge about it, two forums a year with all the
members going to it. And there's a lot of interaction between the
IXs directly.

From our experience, we have, for example, worked together in
Amsterdam where people came together to share they're experiences.
And there's always exchange of information going on between the
exchange points in Europe.

There is also, in most of the countries, there is also various forms
of operator forums. The UK, there's an operator forum in Stockholm,
etc and, through these forums, the exchange points in the countries
would also have interaction for that particular country and do a
lot of work together. So, in Europe, there's a lot of this kind of
collaboration going on and there's a lot of interaction and exchange
of tools, resources and, to some extent, there's also been an
exchange of staff and sharing of common resources. I think that
covers it.

SERGE RADOVCIC:

OK. Thanks, Kurtis. We'll, leave the best till last. Since we're
in the Asia Pacific region. Gaurab.

GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA:

I don't have a slide so I'll go on my piece of paper.

Most of the things are things I've learned from the APNIC IX SIG.
I just know what's happening in the IX SIG in AsiaPac. There are
two extremes in AsiaPac with countries like Japan and Korea who are
asking for 100-GbE platforms for IX traffic and there are countries
in AsiaPac which don't actually have an exchange point at all and
there are some exchange points about 7-meg and then multiple exchange
points in Japan with multiple gigabytes of traffic every day and
every second.

So when you talk about AsiaPac in terms of collaborations, I think
it is extremes from an exchange point point of view. We are not
seeing a lot of active collaboration between exchange points. One
of the forums has been at APRICOT and APNIC meetings. We have had
the IX SIG at APNIC for a while now. That's where we are. We also
have the peering track and IXP discussion track at APRICOT for a
while now. As far as I can remember back in time. That's going -
there is an increasing number of activities but, I don't know. Bill,
how many speakers from Asia did you have in the last three years?

BILL NORTON:

At where?

GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA:

At the peering track in APRICOT.

BILL NORTON:

I don't know. You want me to look it up?

GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA:

That would-be useful. Thanks. A lot of the speakers here are still
from outside the region when it comes to peering and things like
that.

But actually, sitting down here, I wrote down a couple of areas.
There seems to be some collaboration going on between exchange point
operations in Japan and Korea, mainly due to the high demand for
switching fabric. Last year, we had IXP switch at APRICOT and
multiple people talking there.

Second in line, I think Hong Kong is very distributed exchange point
fabric at IXs, omnipresent - everybody over the city connects to
the fibre IX and Singapore is the only place where commercial IX-ing
has actually been done outside of Japan, which is the IX in Singapore
exchange point.

Except for these three main places, all other countries more or
less seems to have not-for-profit IXs. The ones in Taiwan, Korea
are pretty big - there are multiple access points there. We have
new coming exchange points in India, Nepal, Bali and so on.

The exchange point in Australia - and there is one in the PIPE
Network with exchange points in Australia and, in New Zealand, we
have multiple exchange points operating. A lot of other things with
the exchange points - I have list here which says Thailand, Malaysia,
Philippines, all of these countries actually have multiple transit
IX operating there so all PPTs still providing IXP transit services.

The exception is Indonesia, where APJII runs a successful IX point
in Jakarta with three nodes. It seems like there's predominantly
one or two transit providers in the Middle East, basically not
really a transit point there. The NZNOG probably talks a lot about
exchange points. I've been told that at JANOG, they talk about
exchange points in general. At SANOG, we have an IXP track or people
talking about exchange points. And, as I said, at APRICOT and APNIC
at the IX SIG. That's it.

There is not a lot of collaboration happening within AsiaPac. I
think the only peering forum we had was Equinix 1, which was in
Singapore and Sydney or something like that. And PIPE Networks have
been promoting Aussie-NOG. I don't know if it's working or not
because I've been to only one, which was a couple of hours of
drinking beer, something like that.

Other forums, I don't know. So that's it.

Bill will have the numbers.

BILL NORTON:

I just had this year and last year.

GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA:

That works.

BILL NORTON:

This year we had six speakers and Stephen Baxter was the only one
from the region. Last year, we have (counts) eight speakers and
three are from the region.

SERGE RADOVCIC:

So this year, last year we had six speakers, this year we had eight
speakers.

BILL NORTON: Other way.

GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA:

It's there for you (points to transcript screen).

The point is we're still not getting a lot of people from the region
speaking up. I do an IX SIG presentation every six months and I
don't see a lot of people doing that. Thank you.

SERGE RADOVCIC:

OK. Thanks, Gaurab. Globally, I guess we'll do a wrap-up. The figures
according to what we did up there - these are from Bill - comes to
around 260 IXs in the world. My numbers were lower but I think it's
somewhere around that region. We can agree on that.

As I said in my presentation, Euro-IX has gone outside of Europe
now so as a form of collaboration, Euro-IX is starting to move
globally. We have four, looking to be five, IXs starting to move
globally.

PCH - they have IXP construction, information repositories - I think
this can be thrown in the same area.

The peering DB and the chat channel as well, the #IX. I guess,
because we have a few minutes to go, I'll skip a bit. I've got a
few questions up here that I'm posing to you guys.

Is there any questions from the audience? Do you mind using the
microphone, Bill?

BILL NORTON:

Bill Norton from Equinix.

I want to thank you guys for putting this together. I think, generally
speaking, there is not a whole lot of exchange operator-to-exchange
point operator cooperation. I mean, of those 260, from what I've
seen, the European exchange point operators are very sharing of
information; sharing notes on equipment, what works, what doesn't
work and so forth. Which kind of brings me to my question. Why is
it in an exchange point operator's best interest, selfish best
interest, to have more cooperation with those who may compete with
them, either directly or indirectly?

KURT LINDQVIST:

A very simple answer is that most of the European exchange don't
keep. We are not for profit.

SERGE RADOVCIC:

That's true. 80% are not for profit.

RANDY BUSH:

And you're geographically separate.

KURT LINDQVIST:

There's eight of them in London alone.

RANDY BUSH:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Most of them are diverse.

I think there's a social physics that happens in this and many other
things and you can see it in the operating mailing lists, you can
see it so on and so forth and that is that, when there's a small
number of entities, they all communicate with each other. When there
get to be 260 of them, if it starts - it's too much noise, then
people start to localise. Look what's happening with the OG mailing
list and the OGs. There's now SANOG, NZNOG, so on and so forth.
It's trying to get the room small enough that you can have had a
reasonable conversation and that you have common interests.

And so I don't mean to discourage global organisation but I suspect
that there are enough there that what's happening is the regionals
are where the strength is going to be and, as someone who's worked
a long time to push some of the momentum southward into America
Latina and Africa, I think having cooperation in your two regions
and strength there rather than having more honkies coming down from
the north.


SERGE RADOVCIC:

I don't think I'm advocating making this a global IX. That could
be the case if that's what the IXPs want but we at Euro-IX initially
thought, "What's going on in Asia is really interesting. We want
to know more about this." And the Asians want to know more about
this. We've got a lot of experience we can share with each other
so why not join up?

BILL WOODCOCK:

What Randy is saying strikes me as right. What I may say may be an
exception is publication of research and documents, in that dragging
everybody from all over the world to a spot to talk in person and
try and get the room size right, yeah, is a difficult problem and
you may not wind up with people who have interesting things to say
and so forth.

But, on the other hand, encouraging people who do have something
interesting to say to publish it and get it on the Web where people
can find it would, I think, make a big difference. The Koreans, for
instance, I would love to see more about how it is they manage to
handle the volume of traffic they do and it's really difficult to
get anything not in Hangul out of Korea to find that out and so
you've got folks like LINX and AMS-IX doing lab work that they're
working really hard on that and a lot of the answers they want they
could have gotten from Koreans 18 months earlier.

RANDY BUSH:

I think another thing, by the way, I think a large percentage of
it is read each other's mailing lists already. How many people here
read NANOG, SANOG, and so on?

GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA:

One other thing with Asia is also languages are so diverse in Asia
that collaboration is really, really difficult. I mean I know that
I talk to a lot of people here at APRICOT and, well, we can talk
with each other when we are here but communicating for both of us,
in a second language, English, over e-mail.

RANDY BUSH:

All talking in a non-Asian language.

GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA:

For me, English is a second language. For a lot of participants at
APRICOT, English is not a primary language and e-mail, written
communication, is new to some people. I work in south Asia and each
time there is a problem, we've got some collaboration in Kathmandu
and I get more phone calls than I get e-mails. So there is still
an oral form of communication and e-mail really doesn't work all
the time.

KURT LINDQVIST:

I'll second what Gaurab said. I've spent some time making sure that
we can make sure we get everybody with English as a second language
to participate in discussions and as a region with more general
knowledge of English. We don't.

GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA:

The Australians - as I experienced last year at APRICOT, the Aussies
and Kiwis speak a different form of English.

SERGE RADOVCIC:

I think I have to wind it up. I'm going to be around today and
tomorrow so if anyone is interested in chatting with me about
concepts, thoughts, criticisms, whatever, please approach me or go
to the Euro-IX website and you can send me an e-mail there to
serge@euro-ix

PHILIP SMITH:

We've run a little bit over. We've got 25 minutes before the second
session begins. We'll start off with Stephen Baxter and then we
have lots and lots of exchange point updates.

Thank you.