[SIG-IX] AUSBONE, SAIX and WAIX

[Terence <terry@tdce.com.au>]

www/ref:- http://www.ausbone.net


The SME/ISP marketplace in Australia has one working (and long standing)
internet peering organisation; AUSBONE LIMITED.

AusBONE started operations in October 1997, with 4 sites (Brisbane,
Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide,) in the AAPT 3rd party rooms.  The 3
eastern coast sites are still running and have expanded from that small
start.

Originally AusBONE used the AAPT frame network, but now uses an IP VPN
service from Pacific Internet Australia.  The cost of "WAN" traffic on
ausbone is only 1c/M, which includes two large members supplying Asian and
USA based networks.  PI provide the use of 10M uecomm fibre services to
link to ausbone, and we're looking at upgrading some of these to 100M.

As a peering co-operative AusBONE currently has a long reach, with STIX
and AUSIX [Exodus] online, plus an experimental route exchange with WAIX
in Perth, thanks to COMindico and PI.  The current state of the ausbone
route table is:

4126 network entries and 20559 paths using 1148598 bytes of memory
2809 BGP path attribute entries using 146068 bytes of memory
729 BGP AS-PATH entries using 20808 bytes of memory
13 BGP community entries using 312 bytes of memory
1611 BGP route-map cache entries using 25776 bytes of memory
15 BGP filter-list cache entries using 180 bytes of memory
Dampening enabled. 2 history paths, 0 dampened paths
7821 received paths for inbound soft reconfiguration

With 729 unique BGP AS-PATHS, the participation in ausbone peering is
significant for the A/P regions' IP transport.

Funnily enough, our membership doesn't include TELSTRA, OPTUS or AAPT. Nor
Connect.COM (which is present at WAIX,) and other notable junior telco's.  
Flowcom, Equant and STIX are members, plus we have interest from Concert.
[The internationals seem to be more "enlightened".]

AusBONE members do more than peer.  Many of the SME members link their
squid cache farms, and share games and nntp servers (all based at the
exchange point.) The next interesting project we have in "R&D" is a VoIP
toll bypass for members, using open source H.323 servers and cisco
hardware.

All this is done on a volunteer basis, and ausbone rarely bills more than
$20K total each month to members.  AusBONE has been cashflow negative on
occasion, and membership consolidation has been one of two things,
failures and mergers/acquisitions.  In 2000, ausbone saw attrition of
membership numbers, 2001 has seen a turnaround with larger and better
resourced members coming online.

If you want to peek at the routing table:
	http://mrtg.zipworld.net/glass.html

Also, if you need access to a full dump of routes please ask.

Thanks for your bandwidth...

---
Terence C. Giufre-Sweetser

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