Sjoerd van Groning
Nov 1 · 2 min read

Rudolf, an excellent write-up.

I think everybody with at least some peering/transit experience knows the policy of DTAG. If they want to win thge tiering game, I think it would be wiser not to use saturated interfaces but simply reduce the interconnection locations, maybe they can read up on how Telia became Tier1. (free tip for DTAG).

To still have DTAG, being the government owned incumbent, behave as they do know is a disaster for Germany. Still horrible mobile Internet coverage when you are in Germany. Slow speeds to a lot of households, making work from home or having decent Internet for a (small) company very difficult. DTAG is a horrible monopolistic company who certainly does not play nice.

There are some points I do not fully agree with. One being the emphasis you put on the AMS-IX.
Considering the AMS-IX is not a for profit organisation, I think they are heavily overpriced and way too expensive to handle Internet traffic. This in respect to the pricing of other exchanges and in respect to the pricing of transit.
I think NL-IX is a great exchange as a direct competitor of NL-IX and especially with their geographical distribution, bringing an attractive IX to a lot of other locations.
The number of Exchanges you can connect to is growing and I think it is due to the pricing policy of AMS-IX. What about Asteroid (225 for 10GE, and 100GE going down from current 1150 to 750 in the next phase)?

What might also deserves additional attention, are the peeringpolicy’s. Simply being connected to an Internet Exchange means nothing if you don’t follow through by being on a routeserver or making peering sessions. Considering you are nameing smaller companies, it is often impossible to get a peering session with a large telecomprovider. Only reason companies like Breedbandm, A2B etc have a peering with T-Mobile NL is probably because they have it from the past. Getting a peering (in NL or DE) with DTAG is not an option for smaller companies.

I also disagree with the “In theory there shouldn’t have been a problem”. Network performance is highly infleuenced by latency. Even if the peering links of DTAG in Germany would not have been saturated, adding 1000km roundtrip would delay traffic another 5ms, giving much lower maximum speeds. (let alone have all the gamers complain about lag.

Thank you again for all the postings you made and nice to see DTAG is doing a step back. I am afraid, we will not have seen the last of this, not only from DTAG, but also from the other large telecom operators.

Kind regards,
Sjoerd