[governance] Africa to launch own Internet exchange point

[McTim]

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 7:35 AM, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:
>
> Isnt one (biggest?) of the reasons of failures of most public interest IXPs

are there any of these?  IXPs serve the interest of Peers primarily.
They also have the secondary
benefit of keeping traffic local, which is in the public interest.

The existence of an IXP is a success, can you point to any IXPs that
are "failures"?

By what metric do you measure "failure"?


> is that there is no regulatory mechanism to ensure that traffic is exchanged
> at given national or regional exchanges, like there is for telephones.

I recall in Uganda, there is a regulatory impost that providers MUST
interconnect, but regs do not specify where.

They all peer at the UIXP as a matter of convenience.



 For
> which reason big ISPs/ carriers simply refuse to exchange traffic with the
> smaller ones in order to keep the market power advantage and not allow a
> level playing field. Just curious to know.


That does apply, but normally only amongst the dozen or so tier 1 providers.

They want you as their transit customer, not as a peer.

At many IXPs, if you peer with one, you peer with all (using a route
server model).

At many others, peers can make bi-lateral or multilateral peering arrangements.

In Africa, IXP development has been going on for ~15 years.  The first decade
much of the heavy lifting was done by AfriSPA, who are now largely dormant.

ISOC has filled that vacuum admirably in the last 3 years.  It's not
that there is a
lack of capacity concerning BGP (routing), that is only about 10% of the work.
90% of setting up an IXP in Africa is Layer 9 and 10 stuff.  ISOC
workshops also include
information and Best Practices in these areas.

-- 
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel

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