Better than best effort — Rise of the IXP
In my last post I talked about how the incentive models on the Internet keep ISPs from managing peering and backbone capacity in a way that supports reliable communication in the face of ever growing volume of rich media content. If you haven't done so, please read that post before you read this one.It's clear that using an ISP for business communication comes with the perils associated to the "noisy neighbor" ebb and flow of consumer related high volume data movement. Riding pipes that are intentionally run hot to keep costs down is a business model that works for ISP, but not for business users of the Internet. Even with business Internet service, customers may get a better grade of service within a portion of an ISP's networks, but not when their data needs to traverse another ISP which they are not a customer of. There is no consistent experience, for anyone.
However there is an evolving solution to avoid getting caught in the never ending battle between ISP and large consumer content. As the title of this blog gives away, the solution is called an Internet eXchange Point (IXP).
IXPs are where the different networks that make up Continue reading
