The Quilt Fosters Rural Peering

Small ISPs yearning to offer more services now can now do so—if they are lucky enough to be located next to any of the 22 GigaPOPs that are a part of The Quilt.

by Max Smetannikov [September 5, 2003]

The Quilt is not widely known in the ISP community as it is a non-profit organization funded by the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID), better known as the leader of Internet 2 project which links 202 university, corporate, and government partners with a network that is supposed to be a prototype of the next generation of the Internet. The Quilt, with a budget of $300,000 a year, is a cross between a volunteer research project, a lobbying group with consolidated buying power, and a forum aimed at exchanging business practices between educational and non-profit Internet 2 participants representing their common interests to commercial partners.

These interests span a range of topics, but concentrate in the areas of comparing and managing national network facilities; buying bandwidth in bulk; peering and fostering regional fiber development.

"We are not on the bleeding edge of networking research, we are in the space of network infrastructure research and implementation of new technologies," says Wendy Huntoon, The Quilt's executive director and sole full time employee.

Membership in The Quilt is open to GigaPOPs that have four or more connections to Internet 2. Most such GigaPOPs appear to be in rural areas where many university campuses are, and they face many of the issues that rural ISPs face—lack of networking infrastructure and limited bargaining power with large vendors.

The Quilt is helping its members to address these issues. One of the projects run within the organization deals with local municipalities and their plans to build metropolitan fiber networks that third parties would then lease. Another project aids participating members to use their collective bargaining power to get better deals. This last effort has already resulted in cheaper bandwidth contracts since together The Quilt participants are buying 22 Gbps worth a bandwidth per month.

However, it is the peering project that makes The Quilt visible and its efforts meaningful for the local ISP community. Some of the GigaPOPs that are part of The Quilt are acting as local peering exchanges, engaging local carriers, Internet 2 participants, and national players.

The idea behind local peering is pretty straightforward. Since quite a few end users are researchers, academics, and students, many are telecommuting. GigaPOPs that act as local peering points establish direct connectivity with major backbones and in effect keep a lot of this traffic local, shaving off milliseconds off end users' packets round trips and lowering long haul bandwidth utilization for broadband providers.

"Local ISPs participating can typically justify the cost of joining the peering exchange with bandwidth savings, and many gain the differentiation of better than incumbent carrier quality of service," notes Peter Kruckenberg, a peering coordinator with Intermountain GigaPOP and a member with The Quilt's peering group.

Participating in a local peering exchange like this costs about $300 per month, Kruckenberg says, and this is about how much ISPs save in long haul bandwidth costs, since buying a peered connection saves about 1 Mb of bandwidth per month. The effect of better-peered connectivity is instantly seen by those end users who have high bandwidth high latency requirements—such as online gamers. Another less widely used application that is visibly impacted is streaming video.

The fact that peering points are popping up in the locales that previously had little in terms of networking infrastructure is not lost on other constituencies around GigaPOPs. In Utah, where Intermountain GigaPOP is located, state officials and municipalities building fiber started to pay attention to peering. Internet infrastructure is now seen as aiding economic development, a discovery that city fathers in big cities like Miami and New York have made already.

"Having an exchange point is like having a railroad stop in your town—without it the infrastructure is not complete," claims Kruckenberg.

Even though Intermountain GigaPOP and other facilities participating in the peering projects are making good strides towards establishing better peering in the regions typically shunned by commercial operators of peering points, they have their challenges. One is financial—most of the staff are volunteers who believe that this non-profit activity allows them to improve the quality of their job.

The other challenge has to do with explaining the concept of regional peering to major providers. Most large peering contracts are established on the national level, and explaining how local peering would impact national peering sometimes can get overwhelming for all parties involved. While The Quilt participants understand that theirs is not the only peering game in town, they feel they are not losing anything by making their voice heard.

"There are still a lot of things to be determined [with peering], and the Quilt represents one perspective," says Kruckenberg.

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