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THE EIX WORKING GROUP SESSION COMMENCED ON THE 18TH OF NOVEMBER, 2010, AT 9 A.M. AS FOLLOWS:
CHAIR: Good morning, everybody. I'd like to welcome you all to EIX Working Group in Rome. We have got a new format today, as you may have noticed. We can say a big goodbye to the EIX updates and a big hello to the 60 minute standup slot.
We haven't had quite as many applications for that as we would hope to. The idea is that we would have had a single document that people could look, at at the end of the meeting, and see all the IXPs that you might want to join in Europe with all their contact details. But I think we will probably have some extra walk?ups, so we won't have slides but I would encourage people for the next meeting to just one or two slide upload that we can combine into a single document that acts as a reference point for people attending the meeting.
Anyway, the other thing I'd like to say is Cara has resigned as one of the co?chairs due to pressure of work. Andy myself would like to thank her for all her hard work over the last couple of years and wish her well for her M.B.A.
We've decided not seek another co?chair just now because there is a lot of changes happening within the RIPE meeting structure and until they settle down it seems to be pointless to hire a third person for only maybe a short?term appointment. There will be more news happening about that probably over the next six months as various initiatives are launched.
Anyway, on to the meeting. I'd like to say a big thank you to Amanda for being our scribe from NCC and Fergal for acting as our jabber scribe.
The last meeting, does anyone have any corrections they'd like to make or can we approve the minutes? Well, we will take the minutes as approved.
Move on to our first talk which is the first in a regular series of local peer events. Every time the meeting moves we plan to have a section on the local IXP and ISP industry and the first one is going to be on Italy, because we are in Rome. We are still waiting for two of the IXP presenters to arrive so we may break this session into two if they haven't arrived in time for their slot. Just now we will have Telecom Italia and NaMeX talking. We have only got one ISP, so Alberto, are you around? Speak I am not Alberto but...
CHAIR: Maurizio will talk from the ISP side after that.
ANTONIO: Hello everybody. I am not Alberto but since we work together for very long time I am here to talk about the same topic a little bit.
I am in charge of IB Backbone and generating in Telecom Italia and is the oldest and the biggest, up until now, telecom operator in Italy since 1900s, the early 1900s. So we have a very short time this morning to talk about our peering policy, so I will try to keep it short.
And this is the remote, yes. So, peering policies: Let me start with what is the IP Backbone in Telecom Italia, we call it OPB, Optical Packet Backbone. Apart from the denomination, we have, as I said, we have one of the biggest operator right now, so we cover very much of the nation. We are present in 32 ?? the Backbone is present in 32 sites and, here, you find more or less what is the situation and we cover all the major cities and we have a network that is basically a double had you been and spoke centred in Rome and Milan. So Rome collect all the traffic from the south and Milan collect all the traffic from the north and Rome and Milan we have the point of presence in the major Italian Internet Exchange, there are NaMeX of course, and MIX in Milan. And also, we are present in the four regional Internet Exchanges that are in Florence, Turin and Padua and Bari. And the red flags are here to represent that we switched since the mid?2000s to terra router technology. So as you can see, we have cover all most of the sites in the Backbone.
And let me begin with the basis of our philosophy in ?? regarding the peering. Telecom Italia, since the late '90s and the early 2000s, also pushed the policy of encouraging national peering. We have been present in Milan and then in Rome since the very beginning and we are contributors, one of the main contributors to the consortia that basically constituted the neutral access points in Italy and we peer with most of the ?? all the biggest telecom operators and ISPs in Italy.
Presence: As I said, Italy ?? Telecom Italia is present in all the Italian neutral access points and we established peering relationship with everyone, with everyone we recognise, as a peer, of course. Policy in the consortia, in neutral access point changed; now, the characteristic of neutral access points is slightly different from the beginning, since we have a very tight ?? very tight rules of recognising an operator as a peer or not. You know that peering, of course, is on a voluntary basis so we don't peer with everybody.
And we put a custom effort and big investment to ensure that our network, our point of presence at the neutral access points are well dimensioned and with enough capacity.
We are present with big nodes, giga switch routers or so and of course we will go to router technology as soon as we get there.
Total bandwidth available to the neutral access points is about 60 gigabit per second, and private peering bandwidth, it's more than gigabit per second.
This is a very, very classic description of what it is the mechanism of peering. So our network is the yellow, the ugly yellow cloud and at the centre we have the neutral access point and of course we have multiple links that connects us to directly to the ISPs at the bottom, what we call private peering. Of course, the bandwidth involved in the relationship goes over a certain limit, I would say 500 or more Meggy bits per second. And public peerings, of course we are present, as I said, in the site and the ?? where the neutral access point is and of course we have our own upstream provider, it's Telecom Sparkle, it is a tier 1 provider. So we connect directly to our sister company.
Of course, Sparkle establishes direct connection to other tier 1s and other ISPs as a client or a peer. Of course, we have our own clients that has their ? system. So this is the big picture.
Since I have to run through this, I will just to give you a glimpse what is our policy regarding peering. So three simple rules, and you will excuse me if, I will joke about ?? I will joke about it. So if you are a client, you are not a peer, and you first get what you are paying for and no transit through peering.
So, what is if you are a client? There is the good old saying that you probably know, that goes once a peer, never a customer. And that means that, for us, of course, we make money over selling services, so basically, we try to avoid the situation where a client asks us for peering because we don't want to peer a client because nobody wants to give away for free what he can sell. We have, of course, obligation to our stakeholders to make money over the bandwidth.
We generally enforce that rule, but lately, in the last, I would say, three years, of course, we faced a new market, a ?? probably, we feel the urge to find a new model, to accommodate, I would say, the requests that comes from, for example, from content providers like now, TV broadcasters or so on, because they say, OK, I have the content, I give you ?? I give it to you for free but you have to let me peer with you. And we are not ready for that, we don't have a commercial model that can support this, and they are not ready ?? they are not ready for it, either. Then there is Google and so on. So it is a problem. We feel it as a problem, but still, nobody solved it, at least in Italy.
Going further, you first get what you are paying for. That means that, you know, if you are a client, if you are our client and you have a commercial access, you are paying for it and if you have multiple links through ?? to which you can have the same traffic flow, of course, we try to prioritise the link that you are paying for, so the number one at the bottom of the ?? of this figure, means that you receive, as a priority one, the traffic you request from your commercial access, and then if you are connected to another operator, if you have another upstream provider to which we have ?? we have a peering with, of course you can receive the same traffic in case of fault as a backup through the peering links, and more than that, if you have an Internet service provider, I mean, the client you can receive the same traffic through the Internet, so 1, 2, 3 or 4. And you can see from this complicated picture. It makes sense that if you are a client you cannot be a peer because from a BGP point of view, of course, it complicates a lot to have a commercial access and a peering relationship, because, as, you know, BGP only chooses one way.
So, third rule: No transit. No transit is allowed. So a little bit of technicality, but I know you are good at it, so OPB is our network and the autonomous system at 3269, keep it in mind, and so we advertise IX networks to ISP peer one and two. They advertise Y network and Z network so we don't allow mutual redistribution of why to ISP peer 2 and Z to ISP peer 1, that means we don't allow transit for peering traffic, and this is like a golden rule. So whoever wants to take advantage of peering for ?? to get free Internet bandwidth, doesn't go very far with us.
What else? I am done. I was quick, so thanks for your attention. You will find my e?mail address on the ?? on this page so I will be more than happy to answer to your question and whatever you need from Telecom Italia. Thanks
(Applause)
CHAIR: Thank you. Do we have any questions? We do have bribes, we have presents and prizes for anybody who asks good questions. We promise not to laugh at anyone who doesn't ask a good question. So any questions?
ANTONIO: I have a present if it's not too difficult.
CHAIR: No questions. He is here for the rest of the week. Try the veal.
Next up. Maurizio. Luca has arrived. Any sign of Simone? Everyone is here, good.
MAURIZIO GORETTI: Good morning. First of all, you would like to excuse my not so perfect English, so I will try to do my best.
This is, OK, something about some topics to try to let understand you what we do at NaMeX, and more in general, into the Italian peering. I will start ?? I am going to start with some historical information, I did something from the old website. The first exchange point in Rome, one of the first in Italy, was established in the university Caspur ?? in 1995, it was started to be an Internet service provider at that time mainly for the public administration. That was a very special Internet service provider because it was a no?profit Internet Service Provider. This means it was recognised by as a neutral one and together with other three local local Internet Service Provider they decided to start this new thing called access point.
Now aday, the exchange point is still in the university consortium data centre, but some things change from that time. This is the first logo, the first exchange was called NapRoma.
One curious thing is they, for the first time, I think they faced with ? for autonomous system and decided to ask all together for the wrong system so they get four autonomous system that was contiguous from 5394 to 5397. The first exchange point was as in other part, was a very low powered conception equipment, a green of green equipment because it was just a cable and this was the original scheme that I found in digging here on the web. You can see, all the other ISP with respect to Caspur that was in the exchange point has 64 kilobits line. The only problem with their exchange infrastructure was that when a new members come, they need to stop the he can change because when you unplug, if somebody you remember the cable, you have some problem, but from that it worked. This was the original graphs from the first exchange. At that time, we was not able to change that ?? well, we didn't change the configuration of the time?line, so the time came from right to left and so the past was ?? there was to be a default configuration.
So, as I said, things changed and NaMeX became a structure consortium in 2001, the name means ?? it come from the big shell, Mediterranean exchange point. Just because Rome is at the centre of the Mediterranean, that was it, that was the idea.
What is NaMeX today: NaMeX has a main rule, to be a member?based consortium that means to run an infrastructure who main goal is to give better opportunity to its members. We have two main services, the first one is the carrier room where the members can buy or sell circuits and transit at best, and the peering room where to peer with the largest number of ISP.
The rules are simple: You just need to have an AS number and a IP network and we have just only members and no customers.
This is the map of the Italian IXP as I know to list. There are seven now; three new in 2009. NaMeX is the southern one, and yes, has the Telecom Italia, there are national and regional IXPs. This is our, the list of our members, the only autonomous ?? the unique autonomous system. As, you know, we are in Rome, we are this special members that is of the holicy, so we say we are the first and only XP in the world, the first religous exchange in the world so we are waiting for another but maybe that Rome is not the best neutral place to do that.
Some things about the traffic compared to, I did this presentation in Prague sometimes ago. We can see some difference between the Italian traffic, at least the dynamics, and the northern European traffic. If you take the, apart from the amount of traffic, if you take the graph, you can see that during the summer, our graph goes down much more than in Prague the other exchange. This could be maybe that our summer is just a little bit better of Prague. And also, during the Christmas Eve the traffic goes down. This could be that maybe we are some more Catholic than in northern Europe. I don't know.
There are some differences also in the weekly traffic because during ? and Sunday the traffic goes down much more than in other exchange at north Europe, in northern Europe, and in the daily traffic, the peak of the traffic, we have peak at 4 p.m., more or less, instead of other traffic, for example, yes, in Prague in which we have the peak in the late evening.
We tried to collect some traffic during the FIFA World Cup, this is what happened during one of the unlucky Italian matches. This was during a working day, we tried to figure out what happened in the exchange point, they tried to figure what happened in the exchange point, if the traffic increased you are able to see a peak or if the traffic decrease. What happened in NaMeX, that the traffic goes down, the two ?? usually, there is a peak in the centre of the circle and the two down of traffic that you can see there are the two halves of the game and you are also able to see during the break from the two halves the people come back to Internet to do something and then return to watch the TV. It seems that at least for the customer that the exchange traffic in NaMeX, they prefer the TV instead to watch the soccer on Internet.
Some data about NaMeX. We run with our work power, the exchange. We just collaborate with Caspur that it's the only of the centre ?? we are very close even the two consortiums are separate, but there is a lot of collaboration, and we give assistance in installation to our members.
This is some data ?? some data about the data centre of Caspur, they have excellent maintenance and response time, even if they are university consortium, let me say. And the data centre in Rome is one of the most important, I think, in Italy, and in south Europe it was choose enby several public administration departments as a chamber of deputies, and there is an important POP from the national public network and the national research network.
Our peering prices are going down. I think this will continue even the next year.
Inside ?? when the fee that they pay, the members can have a free additional port, we just measure the bandwidth that it consumes, and it is possible to co?locate up to two ?.
This is the carrier, the other main activity that is the carrier interconnection meet me room. There are several carriers with equipment and fibre. This is one of the best, I think, connected in Italy and south Europe, and yeah, we have interesting fee for the member.
For us, it's very important to work a lot with the meetings, so we hold these two meetings every year. They are very successful, we have more than 100 attendees so the members can meet themselves or prospective meet. We have two meetings, a general meeting in winter and a technical meeting, a peering workshop, in spring/summer. Next one will be in January, in Rome.
Future: What we saw in ?? what we see in our exchange point is that for three years now, that our members are more interested in interconnection and less in peering. If they come in the ?? they are interested in exchange circuit or buy or sell transaction with other members, instead of peer. They also peer but this ?? this ?? the second important things.
For us, the main rule of the consortium, as I say, is to provide service for members, to do something useful for that, so there is no truth what do or don't do, but the only thing is to do something that the members agree and can share as idea. So we now say that NaMeX is not a neutral ?? a peering point but it's a point where network meets more in general.
About the future: We have these two projects, the presence in the Mediterranean landing stations and an agreement that we signed with AMS?IX. The idea about the Mediterranean landing stations comes from this map that most of, you know, this submarine cable map. We are interested especially in the cable that comes from Asia to Europe, that I think that somebody call this new ? road, and Italy plays or Mediterranean, more in general, plays an important route as I get to it to Europe for, for this cables, and so to try to be closer and attract operator that come from the C cable, we decided to be present in some of the mainland stations in Italy and in mar say, and in France, so now, we are able to recommend advertise the the NaMeX board to the landing station that is east in Barry, one is Sicily and one in mar say.
At the same time we sign an agreement with AMS?IX that give to our members and all the members that even present in the landing station to be also connected and a member of AMS?IX. This is a general mutual partnership for the good of both. We strongly believe that we are different characteristics, that we can collaborate together for the good of both. This is a factor, this is what happened, but we think that we are able to use our diverse ?? different characteristics to increase the number of our members and but in this moment, there is a circuit that connects NaMeX to AMS?IX. This is not experimental; this is true things and at this moment we have nine members that are connected to this ?? they are going to connect but I think that it starts in during December to AMS?IX, and I think that this gives us even the possibility to increase the number of NaMeX members because of this collaboration, this mutual partnership together with AMS?IX, and I think that is all from me.
CHAIR: Thank you.
(Applause)
Anybody want to win a prize? Oh, we have a contender.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Matthew from Jager Network. I have a question concerning one of your future projects being going to landing station. What we do see is people in those landing station, many some with SDH capacity from Africa, Middle East and Asia and most of the time they are just Backbone from Marseille or Paris or London, they don't have any IP routers in those landing stations. Will you make those people actually install IP routers so they can peer on NaMeX or any Internet Exchange. I think that is a great idea but if they have not have IP routers they won't be able to peer with anybody.
MAURIZIO GORETTI: Yes, it happens that there is a lot of ISP end carriers that are remeetly connected to other Internet Exchange point. They arrive in the landing station. They don't have their circuit but they have the needs, they have to decide to be ?? to peer in the big IXP. So this usually happens, some big telcos are connected to Linx or or /TK*BGS if they don't have IP equipment on the landing station. We think that being present in the some landing station could help the possibility that this potential customer will connect to our exchange and stop the IP traffic in Rome, OK.
Yes, what happens is in Italy, that now, we are ?? Italy is one of the most important countries for the sea cable landing station but most of the carriers just back hole to the north Europe. This is a way we try to stop this traffic north and south. OK.
CHAIR: I think that is worthy of a prize. So come and get one at the break. Question at the back and general a Jabber question.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Mike from Google. I am intrigued, what is the commercial model you have interconnecting between AMS?IX and NaMeX, because bandwidth between the two obviously isn't free?
MAURIZIO GORETTI: You know, the idea, the general idea is to use the possibility to ?? that our member ask it, to optimise the cost, to be connected in AMS?IX. Now, even ISP want to be connected to a big north European IXP, need to buy the circuit and goes there or, you know, OK, the idea is that and this happens to use the membership of our consortium, to share the costs and lower the costs to do that. So and AMS?IX in this ?? we also try to ask this to other IXPs, but I think if I am not ?? if I am not wrong, AMS?IX now is the only one that allows you to have multiple Mac address on just one circuit, so this is give out as member?based consortium to decide to just have one circuit and connect to the members that want to AMS?IX. Our member base, the members that decide to have this kind of services, pace an additional fee to do that.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Is that a flat fee or per Meg fee SIMONE MORANDINI: It's a flat fee that depends on owns the bandwidth that they ask. It's a standard ?? it's a sort of standard things that happens in other exchange point but in this moment, if you want to just to have one circuit for more than one ?? for more than one, then one IXP on the same circuit, the only IXP that gives this kind of service is AMS?IX, that is why we have this agreement. But let me say that it's not just political sentence; the agreement is something more than this, yes, this is, in this moment, maybe more inknow have ative things but I think the collaboration with a bigger ISP, I think it helps it will help us to grow up. This also happened with other ?? this is not an exclusive agreement; this is, something something we decided to do because our member asked. We discussed that, there is a lot of discussion, but at least our board agreed that, for our exchange point, could be a possibility and so that is why we tried to do this.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: That is interesting, thank you, just because I know there has been a lot of attempts in the past at building regional ISPs beyond one city or one area and this seems to be one that is taking off at least in a small way, so it's unusual, so thank you for explaining.
CHAIR: I think that deserves now T?shirt. Come up at the break.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Fergal Cunningham, RIPE NCC on chat from Alexander. He wants to know what is the price for connecting to AMS?IX from NaMeX.
CHAIR: Do you know where he is from?
FERGAL: I asked.
MAURIZIO GORETTI: I don't like to ?? in this moment, we can talk about that off line, yes.
CHAIR: OK. Any more questions. Great, thank you.
(Applause)
MAURO MAGRASSI: Good morning, I am not Simone, of course, my name is Mauro, and I will give you a brief presentation about MIX, what we are and what we do and a brief update of our activities. We have a not?for?profit organisation, which has been established in 1996 as a voluntary and then we became a limited in 2000. The reason ?? we are limited but we perform as a not for profit organisation, just for, say, reasons related to the management of commercial ? in Italy, which is for not for profit organisation like consortium, a bit more cumbersome than for limited.
We have another, say, peculiar aspect which is the fact that we have the data centre, we own the data centre where we are located, at least where we locate the core of our infrastructure and this is due for another historical reason because at the beginning, in the early '90s and even more in this decade, we still miss independent co?locateers, specifically Milan, so the choice of the members we decided to fund the mix at the beginning was to really create a truly neutral environment for the exchange by developing this brand new data centre from scratch. We are based in Milano, Via Caldero, which is the heart of the Telecommunications system.
We have this data centre which is not a big one so it's very hard to make economy of scale but it's ?? it is concurrently maintainable, truly A plus B both on AC power last up to 80 cabinets and still we have plenty of space to be filled up. It's divided into areas where we accommodate, say, different type of architectures and different types of, say, equipment, different type of gears, I will explain you better later when we talk about, say, fees and commercial activities.
A few boring numbers. 89 members, we have a pace of growing about one new member a month. We have a slightly increase in 2010 and 28 carriers which are co?located with us. More than 180 active peering ports and the peak of traffic, 65.
Money: We have a membership fee which is €850 per year, and then we have moved away from a per?meg bandwidth fee scheme into more standard per port approach which is fairly common in two other exchanges. The reason why we started with, at the beginning with the bandwidth fee is, is we tried to help as much as possible small players to join, facilitating them by allowing them to connect with a few euro per month fee for 100 megabit port so we were starting with a concept of the declared bandwidth and you were able to start at as low as 4 megabit per second, say, subscription.
Anyway, we kept the fraction approach, so you can connect and declaring less than the line rate of the port, of course the port is not limited physically.
This is for co?lo, as I said before we own the data centre so we are, somehow, selling co?location, but we are not trying to jeopardise the business of the co?locateers which is around us, around the corner, so we don't want to host, say, general purpose, installations, servers, cages or whatever; we only host routing and transmission gear for carriers which bring us ISPs and for ISPs to peer.
We do accept, say, general purpose servers on a project basis, but we still are keen to host route num servers to top level domains and stuff like that. These are the costs for the space and in the blue wing, we decided the data centre into wings and we recognise them by the colour. The space is allocated in units, I mean, we give included in the fee 12 rack units for each ISP which is joining us and then there is an additional fee if you want more space to put much more tricky gear into our exchange. On the right wing, which is the DC power area, we sell the space in ?? with the tile approach which is much more comfortable for carriers because they want to install their own rack and stuff like that. We do have also a kind of mix and match area where we can mix and match AC and DC power. Well, of course, the power itself is always included in the fees mentioned here.
What we are doing these days: Well, 2010 was a rather busy year. We had the tenth anniversary so we tried to brush up our look and feel and we also had some interesting technical project, we started the route server, we were a bit sceptical at the beginning but we have a very good result, we are very happy about it. We used to BIRD and we are now connecting to it more than 40 percent of our customers.
We were working hard on trying to bring up new POPs for MIX so going out our data centre, keeping the core of the infrastructure at home but opening up new POPs around the city of Milan specific leave so we are at present in Telecity, we are present in KPN quest and infracome, one of the larger data centres.
We have started designing in 2009 a project of fostering and improving the amount of traffic which leaves ?? which stays in Italy in terms of IP from the Mediterranean. We are now ?? we have now deployed switching into inter router in Bari. We have connected it into Milan and we are ready to step customers of there. We are also delivering a new project which is relaxing the approach of having just one customer with one Mac address behind a port, so a group of customers which are connecting from abroad ?? or from a different position with different region in Italy can connect to MIX sharing the access resources and peering port. As I told you before we announced this project earlier this year in Riad, Saudi Arabia, and we are deploying it these days. We want not to miss the opportunitior Italy to be a had you been for the Mediterranean traffic so we are really looking for committed partners to join us in this project and to try to keep as much as possible IP traffic in the centre of Europe.
As per the question which has been issued before, I would like to say that we expect that large players will consider seriously deploying IP routers in landing stations according to the largest saving in terms of latency, they will gain by connecting directly IP with our exchange specifically for the content. While for small players, we expect the landlords to consider maybe deploying some solution of routing over there to help them to have some IP traffic to emerge directly in the station. So that is all. And thank you for your attention. Any questions.
CHAIR: Thank you.
(Applause)
And we have another contender.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: James Blessing from Limelight. That presentation and the previous one, it does look like there is two organisations both building into landing stations in Italy. Would it not make sense to sort of work together on doing it rather than trying to duplicate it all? And the other question, which is sort of the same, is, are you actually building remote ports into the exchange in Milan or are you actually putting ?? switching infrastructure in those locations?
SPEAKER: We decided to go for putting switches in that location because we feel that it might be a bit early for that, but the point ?? the key point will be sooner or later, the fact that people coming from different side of the Mediterranean basin should appreciate the fact that they can exchange traffic ? well, earlier than our friends in north of Europe.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: And the duplication between the two projects?
SPEAKER: Of course we see every weekend, we have good restaurants around so...
CHAIR: I think you win a T?shirt for that. Come up later. Any other questions? OK thank you.
(Applause)
And Luca from TOP?IX.
LUCA CICCHELLI: Good morning everybody. I am Luca of TOP?IX. I am the last of three most important ISPs that are presenting here at the Internet Exchange Working Group at RIPE. So, I would like not to stress you about so many ?? you have already heard about the Italian landscape.
First of all, I would like to tell you who we are and what we are doing. As a company, we are not?profit consortium, founded in 2002, and with the specific mission to set up an IXP distributed IXP in the northwest of Italy, so mainly region exchange point. Now ?? but with the commitment on doing something more and the ?? for example, as you can see here, we are performing now, not only an Internet Exchange point but we are also ?? we are also performing what we call the development programme that is a programme to support Internet ventures in their start?up phase, providing them bandwidth and hosting their applications but for a limited time of period, not competing with companies, for example, such a programme is supported by companies as Telecom Italia and many others.
About our model: I would like to tell you that as the first, we were open in Italy to any kind of AS, so not only ISPs but also ?? but also content application providers and CDNs and now we appreciate that the same open is ?? is recognised by our friends. We are integrated with the local government broadband programme that is called WI?PIE, and of course also with the infrastructure, with such an infrastructure, we provide ?? high availability to our members, but just to figure out our policy, to have an economy of scale, we ?? the IXP is the bandwidth provider for the development programme because, with it, we have the transits for the development programmes and also the peering for that.
We are an open environment since the beginning because, for example, our meetings are open to everybody and we are in such a case we cooperate with the other Italian IXPs, for example in last IXP NaMeX participated to our meeting.
Just some more technical figures. Access is available from ten MEGS to 10 gig ports. Why 10 MEGS? Because our infrastructure, as you can see in the next slide, cover all the regional territory, so it's important for the very small ISPs, especially wireless Internet Service Providers, to have 10 Meg ports. It's a request, so we continue maintaining that, but apart from that, you can be connected to TOP?IX with, of course, your own infrastructure, if you have one, or connectivity from international to national carriers and you can see some examples listed here.
About the housing, we do not have our co?location space, but we are using different co?locateers in different point of presence. There are many point of presence. You can see there how many ?? I don't remember the number now, because my memory is too short, but there are many. We can count because here, because we have four core POPs, core switches, of course, nine we call them Backbone because we are using the Backbone that is provided by the local government in the cooperation I mentioned before, and five POPs that come south ?? that come out from other forms of cooperation, normally with other local public administrations.
About the cooperation with other IXPs, it was presented in several times but it continues, the cooperation, we have with another exchange, a small exchange, in France, in the city of Lyon. The reason was of such a cooperation was about because we are both continuous territories and there are some economical and political exchanges, so why do not provide, also, IP traffic exchange jointly was that the question ?? ? the question we had two years ago, and so we established an experimental connection that allows the extension of topics ?? VLAN to Leerings and vice versa. So the model we we have and we would like to continue having, is that each IXP maintains its own independence. So if you are a Lyon IX member you do not have to become a TOP?IX member to exchange traffic in TOP?IX, and you do not have to pay more at the moment. We are still thinking about the economic model, so I would be able to tell you more next year, unfortunately not now, but since next year, we are planning to have it with quality statements, so with help desk available 24 hours, for example, and with the same availability we have of the ports, we have in our service description, you can download on our web page.
Here are reporting some key features, for example about the traffic. We got 32 gigs of traffic and we got it during the world football champions, so it was strange, but it was now ?? now, we are, our peak traffic is less, but 24 more or less. One more thing I would like to underline in this slide is the development here of route servers of course, we are now using QUAGGA in both IPv4 and IPv6. And we are also experimenting another connection with other Italian ISPs, VSIX, not presented here but Maurizio showed you before where it is located.
Just to conclude my presentation because also the other two guys told you something about the next steps.
At the moment, we do not have plans about ?? so we are not the third IXP working to be placed in landing stations, just to...
But we are looking with the partnership, with Lyon, because because they are close to mar say, so in such a case we are also involved in this issue, what we are doing, what we are ?? the subject, the issue we are working is what we ?? with the so?called inter club exchange, so our plans to the futures are relating to leveraging the level of the exchange, so not remaining at the IP level but also to other forms of computing. And so, we have seen some similarities, so Internet is to the Internet Exchanges as the cloud computing is to the inter cloud exchange, but just to show you, this is only at the moment a concept. Even if there are many companies now, commercial companies especially in the US that are working in the brokering of cloud computing resources, one of them, for example, is a Toronto based company that has created a spot cloud as a broker of co?computing resources. And many similarities, many points of contacts within the two exchange levels are shown here.
Now, there is no time to go inside each of one, but, for example, neutrality is one of the things that have to be exploded, also in this new ?? in this new trend. And also, the others.
From the technical point of view, some of the steps, the technical, especially technical, not all economical, that has ?? we have to afford are listed here and just for example, the addressing between different in an application that is running in different clouds, in such a way is more or less the same problem that we have with DNS, so probably someone is thinking that Anycast, with a possible solution for that. And the last, the access to storage resources because you can use different resources located in different places.
So, many points and just to conclude, to conclude my presentation, many ?? we have many helpers for the future, not leaving, of course, our core business that is the IP exchange, the IP traffic exchange.
I finished so if you have any questions, please ask me now or if if we have time, or off the line.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Thank you Luca, for...
(Applause)
CHAIR: Could you introduce yourself again.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Matthew from Jager. You are currently in partnership with Lyon IX in France, they are planning to go to mar say, having plans to have some partnership with IFX in Paris, a new, how would this thing work, if UN?IX is partnering with you and with IFX, will you also be partnership with the guy in Paris or is it like two completely different things?
SPEAKER: At the moment two completely different things. But as you probably know, we currently meet with UN?IX guys so it's an open issue, so why not? But so, as we are only ?? I showed you before we are 12 people TOP?IX but only three or four, we are two people here, myself and Gabriella who is seated in the room and another guy that are strongly related to the Internet Exchanges, so we prefer working on a step?by?step approach, so at the moment only ?? the only established relations is to Lyon, UN?IX and of course if they will have a switch in Marseille landing station we would be able to get that. Thank you.
CHAIR: OK. Thank you. Thank you very much, Luca.
(Applause)
Next up we have Serge who is going to give us a very brief Eur?IX update because we are running a bit late. It likes like F is going to be in the second session.
Serge: Thank you, my name is Serge of the European Internet Exchange Association. One thing I didn't see from the Italian landscape was how many IXPs there are in Italy. Some of you that aren't aware of it there is currently seven IXPs, two in Milan, one in Rome, one in Padua, one in Udina, one in Florence and one in Treno, six of them are members of Eur?IX. So that was a bit of a catch up, yes.
So what thought I would give you an update on the current European IXP scene and a little bit of news goes on in EURO?IX.
If you look at the figures from the end of August 2010, to my best knowledge there is 127 operating IXPs in Europe so this is up on last year and it's still increasing and this is a net increase. There is probably been about 10 new IXPs established and a few closed down, so they are still popping up. Some of this is due to the fact that a couple of countries, new countries have also got IXPs. Some of it is due to the fact that I am now finding out about these countries that we didn't know. I didn't know that Belarus and Moldova had one. I will get back to the countries in a minute.
The sites are also increasing, not only due to the fact there is more IXPs showing up in Europe but some of the already established ones are getting extra co?locations and some of them more regional ones such as TOP?IX and NIX in the Netherlands are going to different cities in their regions.
Participants is also up 10 percent and this has been a trend going on for the last three years. It's still moving up, I don't know where they are coming from but they are turning up. And another trend that we see is the fact that IXP participants are now going to multiple IXPs. This has been going up by about 20 percent over the last four years, up 24 years on last year, IXPs aappearing at least two and the ISP are the participants appearing at ten or more.
This is what the asterisk was about, I wanted to highlight the fact that there is one sort of, for lack of better word, grey region in Europe where there aren't any ISPs established are part of the ball cans,. Now, there is one underway in nearly all of these countries, there is initiatives that are either started or they are looking into it and one bit of news, EURO?IX PCH, RIPE, and MENOG got together and we put together a one?day starting in IXP in Istanbul about a month ago and I think that was successful, a couple of those countries showed up and took a lot of experience back with them.
So looking at traffic as a whole, it's still increasing, between 50 to 60 percent depending on the region in Europe, but now cracked the five terabits per second barrier as an ago grate, as a couple of these Italian IXPs showed you the lulls are always through the summer and Christmas period, in fact most of the growth within a year happens to occur after August in Europe, so those later months is when the majority of the growth occurs.
About a year ago, we were in Lisbon and I had a go at projection of the aggregated traffic in Europe using the data that we have, that we started collecting in 2002, I projected around 5 percent by the end of the year for our member ?? 5 terabits per second for our membership. We are now at 4.5, that is the end of October so we have still got a couple of months to go so I think we are right on target, if I am going to have another go at it I would probably say by 2011 it's going to be 8 terabits per second across the IXPs in Europe and looking a little bit further along, around 60 terabits if this keep up by the end of 2015.
So how does Europe compare to the rest of the world? Well, as always, Europe and North America tend to be about on par as far as IXP traffic growth goes. Asia always lags behind, and Brazil ?? because I mention Brazil because I don't have reliable enough statistics on the whole of South America or Africa but Brazil, I do, luckily PTT provide great statistics on all 14 of their IXPs, they are up 140 percent on 12 months ago and I think before that, they were up 90 percent, so globally, we are looking at between about 50 to 60 percent.
I don't have statistics on all the IXPs in Europe that are using route servers but EURO?IX, our members do update a route server database, they put information about the deem ones, software, any other facts they have got. I think there was around 20 to 25 IXPs that are involved in our current initiative so these are some stats that we pulled out of that database just to show you the most popular deem ones, BIRD and QUAGGA seem to lead the way. EURO?IX has got initiative going to try and improve the QUAGGA version, and of course, some of the members are using other options as well, so that is just a little bit look a at the EURO?IX stats.
Now, IPv6, I keep getting a lot of questions about what stats I have got about the participants, the amount of traffic, the amount of IPv6 traffic compared to IPv4. I don't have these statistics. Most of our members don't, so I am going to try and ?? some of them, I am going to try and include this in following reports and get some more data, even our membership is asking for this so I sort of promised to come back with this at sometime in the future.
Now, a lot of information that I just showed you is available in our annual reports on European IXPs. This is currently being approved by our membership. They are having a look at it to see what faults and typos they can pick up. I have given them three weeks so on 21st of December, they will be finished and I will publish it by the 22nd of November, so if you go to EURO?IX/resources, these sort of reports and other information about IXPs in Europe are available to you all.
So, some news about EURO?IX. Our affiliation is still growing. We currently have 52 afill /KWRATS. The majority of them are still based in Europe. We have 41 members in around 25 countries who actually operate 63 IXPs throughout Europe so that is around half of the European IXPs now affiliated with EURO?IX and there is about eleven IXPs outside of Europe. Our latest members to join this year, EC IX who is situated in three different stays, in Germany, joined us earlier in the year, CA R IX, car inbean Internet Exchange joined us in May and I was proud when PTT metro Brazil, 14 locations in Brazil, 14 unconnected, they joined us a few monthsing back and France?IX is also on board, so we have three of the biggest Paris Jan with us now.
It is open to every IXP. We would like every European IXP at minimum to be associated with EURO?IX, to try and help this endeavour what we have done is we have reduced the membership fee to those IXP that is don't feel they have the resources, the time, the finances, whatever, to come to the EURO?IX forum, so it's a substantial decrease in the fees for these people so if you are interested, you are one of those IXPs that thought the membership fees were too high, please come and have a chat with me and I will explain to you what the remote associate membership is about. This was always available to IXPs outside of the European region; this is now available to any IXP anywhere in the world, including Europe.
Our forums, we just had a forum in Oslo about a month ago. It was probably one of our most highly rated forums, about 40 IXPs turned up. Thanks NIX Norway for hosting that at the university. Our next is in Sicily, Italy, for the Americans that didn't know where Sicily was. It's going to be hosted by MIX of Milan and that is on the 30 and 31st of May. If you are interested in attending, please come and see me and we can talk about the possibilities of that.
And that was it. Are there any questions? At all? No. OK. Thanks.
CHAIR: Thank you, Serge.
(Applause)
Right. We are going to start section E and I will probably only get a couple of items done on that and then we will break for coffee and then carry on, but I would encourage presenters to be shorter rather than lengthier. So first up is LINX ??
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: You should offer T?shirts for the shortest presentation.
KAMRAN KHALID: Good morning, all. This is, a brief overview of the architecture review presentation from the last LINX meeting. Just to put everything into context. I would like to start with a brief history of of the LINX network to put this had he review into context. Back in '98 LINX was consisting of a Backbone with Cisco and catalyst switches. In '98 we grew and we were present in two locations, that was in Telehouse and Telecity, and a vendor policy was established. The vendors were extreme and packet exchange. In 20,000, the red bus site was added to the LAN and in 2001 F D D I support was removed from the network. In 2003, the dual LAN topology was set sup, so we basically separated the two vendor hard wares that we had and they were kind of given the nicknames of the Foundry LAN and the extreme LAN. This split was helped in the scalability of the network and allowed us to prevent kind of vendor specific issues affecting all of our members.
And in 2007, the networks grew further so we were table to establish multiple rings per each LAN.
CHAIR: Shall we break early for coffee and come back? If we can come back for about ?? if we could come back for about ten to, five to 11, please. Thanks.
(Coffee break)