Telecom Tim 09: Keynote Job Witteman on AMS-IX and growth

Job Witteman, Oei ik Groei…

Oops, I’m growing. Our growth shows the traditional hockeystick. In the summer we see a decrease in our growth. After the summer, when it’s cold our growth continues. Our IXP offers ISPS a neutral environment to interconnect their IP traffic. It’s a physical infrastructure where the ISP connects his network too.

ISP’s need to make their own peering agreements with other parties. The IXP itself isn’t a party in that deal. We don’t define what an ISP is, this has opened up our IXP to content providers like the public broadcasters and also the likes of Google. Traditionally the iXPisn’t used for exchanging Transit deals, but we don’t prohibit that. Peering is really a bilateral arrangement. My traffic to your network and your traffic to my network. It’s limited to that network. The IXP is neutral. We only charge for the port and we don’t take a fee per costs.

AMS-IX is the biggest with 846 Gbps and 54% growth. Moscow is smaller, but has 200% growth. The top 3 IXP’s take 60% of the traffic. The next 5 take 20% and the following 11 take 13%. Being big is an advantage. It draws more customers, which attract more customers still.

We’re an association, with a limited corporation. Everyone connected is a member of the association. Every member has one vote. There is a board with 5 members and 2 times a year there is a general meeting. In those meetings we vote for board members and the Long Term Commercial Plan.

All the stock in the limited corporation is owned by the association and can’t be sold. The limited corporation owns all assets, but it only lives to serve the association.

Basic values are:

-          Neutral and independent,

-          Democratic and open

-          Reliable

-          Continuity

-          Leading edge technology

-          Dynamic

-          Not-for-profit

Our core switches can work with 128 10Gbit/s ports at non-blocking speeds.

3 interconnect options:

-          Transit (also known as upstream). Can be quite expensive

-          Private interconnect

-          Public peering over IXP’s

Most ISP’s make use of a mix.

Carriers and mobile interconnects

IP convergence in the 2 world. Mobile operators are united/associated in a separate VLAN on the AMS-IX infrastructure for GRX roaming. There is a strict separation with the internet. There is a Closed User Group with its own agreements.

My first statement is:

-          Mobile internet is an illusion.

-          Mobile internet is a goldmine for the Mobile operators. Mobile telco’s don’t need to do anything for their customer. At 10 euro per month this can be as much 100 million per month in the Netherlands. You can build a nice network for that.

-          Video is not disruptive and will nog give you an exaflood, it’s normal growth and business as usual.

The growth at the GRX V-Lan is now around 100%. It used to be 1000%. We expect more growth if the mobile telco’s connect to the ISP VLAN and interconnect directly.

Question XS4All, where is there a possibility for disruption. Job explains about how well they organized everything redundantly.