Quo vadis Open-IX? Trying to boost public peering in the US Nikolaos Chatzis Georgios Smaragdakis TU Berlin MIT / TU Berlin
[email protected] [email protected] Anja Feldmann Walter Willinger TU Berlin NIKSUN
[email protected] [email protected] This article is an editorial note submitted to CCR. It has NOT been peer reviewed. The authors take full responsibility for this article’s technical content. Comments can be posted through CCR Online. ABSTRACT net’s peering ecosystem to mean the set of all publicly routed Au- The recently launched initiative by the Open-IX Association (OIX) tonomous Systems (ASes) interconnected with peering and transit to establish the European-style Internet eXchange Point (IXP) model links or relationships, and are mainly interested in Internet peer- in the US suggests an intriguing strategy to tackle a problem that ing; that is, a bi-lateral business relationship between two networks some Internet stakeholders in the US consider to be detrimental to whereby they reciprocally provide access to each other’s customers. their business; i.e., a lack of diversity in available peering oppor- Specifically, we distinguish between public peering which is In- tunities. We examine in this paper the cast of Internet stakehold- ternet peering across a shared switching fabric or platform and pri- ers that are bound to play a critical role in determining the fate vate peering which is Internet peering across transport (i.e., “cross- of this Open-IX effort. These include the large content and cloud connect”) with exactly two parties connected (e.g., via a fiber con- providers, CDNs, Tier-1 ISPs, the well-established and some of the nection or point to point circuit).