PTC’07 Proceedings

THE TRANSIT EXCHANGE - A NEW MODEL FOR OPEN, COMPETITIVE NETWORK

SERVICES

Michael Hrybyk
BCNET
Canada

ABSTRACT

New and innovative multi-functional networks and services can be easily created using
transit exchanges.

The universities and institutes in British Columbia require experimental networks for
computer scientists, high throughput networks for physicists, chemists, and other
supercomputer users, as well as links to the global internet and the local community for
teaching and community service. This has to be done cheaply, reliably, foster
competition, and use next generation network equipment and services.

To do this, BCNET has created a set of transit exchanges (TX) across the province.
Each member institution is given dark fibre connecting its campus to a downtown meet-
me point (the TX), which consists very simply of a patch panel (for fibre cross-
connects), ethernet switch (for VLAN cross-connects) and a router (strictly for local
peering). At the TX, members can peer with each other for free, can obtain Internet
service from a set of competitive providers, and connect to advanced networks such as
CA*net4. In BC, over the past 2 years, TXs have allowed member institutions to
increase Internet bandwidth by a factor of 4 and decrease costs by 30%. Research
bandwidth has increased by an order of magnitude for very small marginal costs. By
connecting each member to multiple internet service providers at each local TX as well
as to the research network, reliability has also increased.

The simplicity of the TX model, as open POPs, can encourage competitive access and
therefore ensure network neutrality results. The set of TXs within the province of British
Columbia is a case study illustrating one way to accomplish these goals.

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1. INTRODUCTION

The digital revolution is in full swing, made possible by incredible advances in computer
power and miniaturization, as well as optical and RF network technologies. But the
overall structure of our telecommunications networks has remained relatively
unchanged. Even though packet switching is increasingly used in most parts of the
network, the core structure of telecommunications is still based on one or more local
loops (coax, RF, fibre, twisted pair, …) to a wire centre and central office, head end or
the like. Packets are routed from the user on the end of this local loop to the backbone
of the service provider, which is peered with others providers at Internet exchanges.

The functional aspect of networks has changed markedly, helping to fuel the digital
revolution. The end-to-end principle has prevailed, and TCP/IP packet switching has
triumphed over circuit switching [1]. The notion that a data centre or even a home user
needs multiple end-to-end connections sparsely distributed over time has taken hold.
Multiple browser windows connect to multiple sites which in turn might reference other
sources. File sharing schemes grab partial data from a myriad and highly tuned set of
sources that can change dynamically, exploiting parallelism and improving throughput
[2]. These innovative systems would have been difficult to construct using traditional
circuit switching systems that assume relatively long hold times.

Even though the functions available to network users have made quantum leaps, the
overall structure of the network has remained the same. In fact, the structure of the
Internet has remained unchanged since the demise of NSFNET in 1995 [3], which
resulted in the creation of the MAE™s [4], or Metropolitan Area Exchanges. The MAEs
ensured the Internet of the day was not cut into disjoint pieces unable to communicate
with each other. They were the first Internet exchanges, and there were only two to start
- one on the U.S. west coast, and the other on the east coast. The notion that peering
solves the disjoint network problem is fundamental to the working of today’s backbone
Internet.

End user sites still connect to the Internet via a single local loop and a service provider
backbone network. The backbones peer at various Internet exchanges or carrier hotels,
the number having grown since 1995. This structure is no different than the post-
NSFNET 1995 model, where regional networks could choose their backbone
provider(s), all of whom were required to peer at the MAEs.

It is not clear that this structure will be scalable or even hospitable to new applications.
The peering points become bottlenecks. The lock-in to a single provider stifles
innovation and keeps overall price points high for next generation network access.
Issues such as net neutrality loom large with a single provider per user site, as
consumers have no choice available. Since the provider owns the “eyeballs,” the
provider can begin to charge the application service downstream premium prices, or
dictate the flow of information. Captive users, with structural impediments to switching
providers, simply have to make do with the situation.

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Is there another approach? Is there another structure that could better meet the needs
of emerging applications? Can the overall network structure dovetail with the newly
minted functionality being demanded by users?

2. A NEW NETWORK STRUCTURE: THE TRANSIT EXCHANGE (TX)

A new structural approach uses Transit Exchanges (TXs). A TX is much like a

bandwidth mall or airport. Users or customers enter through fibre or other media
provided by a municipality or other supplier, and become connected to each other and
to the larger world via a marketplace of service providers. Specialty networks, such as
CA*NET4 or the BCNET Advanced Regional Optical Network (ORAN), also are
available at TXs. Users can connect to multiple providers, and change providers simply
by having software configuration changes made in the TX switches.

The TX is a centrally located piece of physical infrastructure, or neutral “meet-me”

place, where organizations can interconnect directly with each other to share data traffic
and access various commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The advantages of
the TX are considerable cost savings, decreased latency, increased bandwidth and
redundancy.

TXs are not MAEs. MAEs are for service providers, used for backbone peering. TXs are
for users to obtain Internet connectivity from many providers, access specialized
networks and services, and peer with other local users. TXs represent a fundamentally
different structure than what is used today from the perspective of an end user site.

The TX facilitates redundancy for users by supplying access to a variety of

commercially available Internet Service Providers (ISPs) through a single physical
connection. Latency is reduced, as the direct interconnection at the TX avoids having
data travel to distant cities to get from one network to another. Local users get the
equivalent of free, fast local calling, as data that stays within a TX never enters an ISP
network. This decreases costs and increases performance, in so far as data stays local.
Local content is given a distinct advantage and performance boost. In a world where
peer-to-peer networks reign and locality of reference becomes even more important, the
TX brings considerable benefits.

A TX is similar to a traditional telephone central office or wire centre, but is much

different regarding service provisioning. The TX is open by design, rather than a closed
central office, and encourages variety, much like an airport or mall might do. Richness
in services provisioned at TXs adds value, and ensures that end customers are
satisfied. Service variety and competition also means customers can choose providers
who respect net neutrality, and thereby provides a market rather than regulatory
mechanism to deal with this problem.

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The components of a transit exchange are as follows:

• Layer 1: fibre and copper patch panels

o Allows for cross-connects at the media layer.
• Layer 2: Ethernet switch (10/100/Gb/10GbE)
o Supports VLANs, tagging and QoS
o Used to implement multiplexed connections from users to providers.
o Providers only need a single large circuit to service many customers
• Layer 3: peering router
o Every user of the TX gets a VLAN to the multilateral peering router.
o User prefixes are exported to all peering participant.
o No other routing is done by the TX operator.

TXs are constructed to data centre standards, with adequate HVAC and power,
including UPS and motor generator backup. All BCNET TXs are built to these
specifications.

Currently only one TX exists per region within British Columbia, but there might
eventually be several TXs in any given area. The end user, for added redundancy and
market choice, might connect to two or more TXs, depending on need. Cabling
infrastructure could be designed such that rings connected all end user sites to multiple
TXs.

3. THE CHALLENGES OF NEW NETWORKS

One of the fundamental changes influencing the growth of current networks is the
discovery that people want to (1) connect directly to each other, and (2) form groups
that communicate on an ad hoc basis [5]. These connections and groups eschew
centralized services, preferring the peer-to-peer model. Content is increasingly
distributed not from central data warehouses, but from distributed peer-to-peer services.
Rich connectivity to multiple peers enhances the throughput and increases the overall
usability of such services. Directory services are generally the only things that are
centralized, and even those are increasingly distributed.

The new networks and their use are summarized in the table below.

Old Networks New Networks

Few producers
Limited distribution
Content and network tied
Asymmetric
Centralized
One size fits all
Everyone is a producer
International distribution
Content independent from
network
Symmetric
Peer-to-peer
Customizable/flexible

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Real time, time slots Statistical multiplexing,

adaptable in software

FIGURE 1 - COMPARISON OF NEW AND OLD NETWORKS

Next generation networks take full advantage of FTTH and RF facilities. Bandwidth in
the local loop no longer becomes an issue if fibre is available and can be provisioned
using relatively cheap Ethernet. In any case, the network media is no longer tied to the
application or content, which frees both the network operator and the content purveyor
to pursue different strategies. In the former’s case, building rich connectivity to many
diverse content servers or peers becomes the goal, and in the latter, delivering
compelling interactive content for new high resolution displays becomes possible. For
all this to happen, the structure for connecting users to each other on the Internet needs
to change. Our cities need to be re-cabled and a new service structure needs to
emerge [6].

4. TRANSIT EXCHANGES AS A BUILDING BLOCK FOR NEW NETWORKS

Cabling is not the only thing needed. End users need multiple paths to each other and
to the backbone, which consists of a plethora of service providers. The paths need to be
easily changed via software. Some have suggested that network connectivity should be
a software service like any other, and have tried to create a service-oriented
architecture (SOA) to effect this. Lightpaths or VLANs could be created by end users for
their own purposes. TXs enable easy local peering, and dynamic choice of upstream
service providers by end users.

CANARIE and CA*net4 make extensive use of User Controlled Lightpaths (UCLP)
which are high speed optical circuits that can be set up by researchers with high
performance network requirements, or by specialized TX operators on behalf of users.
These lightpaths are viewed as a software service, and are treated like any other object
under the Web Services model [7].

5. USING MULTIPLE PROVIDERS AT TRANSIT EXCHANGES

TXs and multifunctional networks, replete with multi-homing, work for large
organizations like universities who have the expertise and the address assignments to
use BGP effectively. In order for the richness of the connectivity of TXs to generalize to
a larger population, addressing and routing issues need to be resolved. For example,
home users cannot peer with each other and access multiple upstream providers at the
same time given such limitations. Home users cannot get globally routable address
space, and the small home routers can not adequately carry the full routing tables or run
BGP. Thankfully, research in routing is providing some direction here [8], and IPV6
could over the long run might offer larger amounts of globally accessible address space.

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The redundancy inherent in multi-homing also needs to be enhanced, as convergence

times when one provider goes down can be non-deterministic [9].

Using various work-arounds, multi-homing using current methods at TXs can work quite
well. For example, an end site can have a primary and backup provider, and have
peering using more-specific addresses in routing tables. This is not the optimal solution,
but is good enough to deliver the peering and redundant features of a TX [10].

6. UNIVERSITY REQUIREMENTS FOR MULTIFUNCTIONAL NETWORKS

Universities need new networks, and require structurally different approaches.

Researchers need experimental networks as well as high throughput networks for
manipulating large data sets and instruments ranging from high resolution telescopes to
colliders. And the entire academic community, especially students with wireless devices
on campus and wired dorm rooms, need robust, fast, and cheap Internet access.

The one-size-fits-all approach offered by current service providers does not meet all of
these needs. In fact, using traditional approaches, one would have to purchase three or
more networks from potentially different suppliers, as per figure 1 below. Instead, using
a multifunctional network provides a very cost-effective and reliable solution.

Multifunctional networks provide for the following:

• raw vs. refined access

o Access to basic cable pairs allows any set of protocols between sites.
o Virtual connections which are more scalable but still allow for protocol
variety
• closed group vs. universal
o Sites typically need to be members of many virtual private networks, easily
configured.
o Global Internet access is also needed.
• throughput vs. latency
o The ability to place quality of service parameters on various network
connections is important
o Research applications need high throughput for large datasets.
o Collaboration applications, important to research activity, need low
latency.
• unicast vs. multicast vs. broadcast
o Network must provide the ability to do all of these, potentially at different
layers

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University Mission

Teaching Research Community Service

Experimental
Networks

High Performance
Networks

The Internet

FIGURE 2 - UNIVERSITIES AND NETWORKS

As the diagram depicts, universities require multifunctional networks, given their diverse
mission and requirements.

7. CREATING AND SUPPORTING EXCHANGES: PACKETFRONT AND IHN

MERKATO

Several companies have created software and systems to help manage open
exchanges. Packetfront [11] helps network owners dynamically provision capacity and
services for users. Invisible Hand Networks (IHN) [12] operates a bandwidth exchange
in New York City, and has created the Merkato software system to provision acquired
bandwidth dynamically.

Packetfront is one of the leading suppliers of broadband provisioning systems. The

Swedish company enables service providers to easily create a market basket of triple
play offerings (internet, voice, television), and allows end users to choose customized
versions of such services in a fully automated fashion. But more interesting, the
company via its service selection portal “gives end users the possibility to activate and
deactivate services in a simple and user friendly manner - in real time, making it more
attractive to subscribe to broadband services.” Packetfront has been used in Sweden
and by the Columbia Mountain Open Network (CMON) [13] in British Columbia to create
user-selectable network services. Packetfront has not yet implemented user peering
and user-controlled VLANs, which is important to the operation of a TX, but the focus on
management and multi-service provider systems make it a contender for future TX
operating software.

From Packetfront’s web site, “Service providers are given an attractive arena to present
and expose their services, whether it is voice (telephony), Internet or TV. This involves

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up-sale possibilities for service providers, as end users will subscribe to new services
due to simplicity and their increased freedom of choice.”

Invisible Hand Networks has created a similar software solution for exchange operators,
having developed Merkato™. Merkato has the following features (taken from the IHN
web site):

• Allows multiple IP capacity sellers to price bandwidth based on market demand

and sell previously unused excess capacity.

• Allows capacity buyers to purchase bandwidth on demand, in any amount, with

guaranteed allocation. Costly fixed term and 95th percentile contracts,
increasingly a source of customer irritation, are no longer necessary.

• Optimizes market-based pricing. Sellers can manage their bandwidth pricing to

take advantage of customers’ willingness to pay, and buyers can buy the
capacity they need, when they need it. A combination of reservation and spot
markets meet diverse customer needs, and new sales occur at 5-minute
intervals.

Merkato’s market-based approach could be used successfully in TXs, but the current
emphasis is on large institutional users, and has no facilities for dynamic VLAN
provisioning. Also, there is no inherent facility for local peering, although that could be
added easily. Using Merkato, end users could bid and acquire all sorts of services
including upstream Internet connectivity. In a sense, Merkato is eBay for networks. The
TX model would support the Merkato market quite well.

8. THE ROLE OF TRANSIT EXCHANGES IN MUNICIPAL NETWORKS

Most municipal utility models (wireline or wireless) simply replace the old RBOC as the
monopoly with the city as the service provider. This does not serve to produce a
competitive and innovative marketplace, and given the need to extensive deployment of
new technologies and constant upgrades, this model may have severe shortcomings.
Also, government-controlled access networks could also impact net-neutrality, as
policies could influence content or application access.

The TX model is a disaggregated scheme that allows for the municipality to deploy
cabling in an orderly manner, without committing the city to provide service over those
cables. In fact, cable bundle strands may be leased to end users directly, who may
assign rights to an operator or service provider for a time period. The city oversees the
cable installation, but does provide data services directly over it. That is the function of
the TX and various service providers located in and around it.

TXs give municipalities the incentive to create new fibre cabling infrastructure. It frees
the city from being involved in the delivery of the services, and emphasizes the role of

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the private sector in doing so. The city as a simply cable provider can do what it does
best, which is to optimize facilities for the common good, but using as small a footprint
as possible. The TX allows the cities to concentrate on urban infrastructure, and simply
calculate the ROI on the infrastructure when other upgrades (roads, sewer, etc.) take
place.

The city can take an incremental approach if necessary with partial upgrades, which
lowers the overall cost and can increase the adoption of broadband fibre networks.

9. LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION …

Fibre cable has to terminate somewhere. That spot is the TX. The TX can be operated
by a neutral third party, and might typically be a non-profit at least to start. This is no
different from other types of switching centres which serve as magnets for various profit-
making enterprises. Airports are typically non-profit, and provide a way for passengers
to get to airlines, or switch between or within these service providers of the skies. Stock
exchanges have elaborate mechanisms for moving financial instruments from a
stockholder to a purchaser. In the most striking analogy, shopping mall operators are
profit-making enterprises that are in all cases separate from the retail shops that provide
services and products for consumers. The TX is the bandwidth and network service
mall.

The TXs do not have to be large - in small cities, they only need to occupy a few racks.
But the facilities in which they exist must have room for growth, and therefore should be
placed in buildings with adequate areas to expand.

Current TXs located in city halls (or in universities, for example) do not have this
characteristic. TXs need to be located in buildings that have room to accommodate data
centres, web farms, co-location facilities and service provider equipment rooms. TXs
should also be located in areas of a city that are close to regional telecommunications
infrastructure (long haul condo fibre bundles, which tend to be near rail lines or main
highways).

TXs were created to serve as hubs for British Columbia’s research and higher education
community. Each TX supplies access to the provincial research and education network,
called the ORAN (Optical Regional Advanced Network), as well as the commercial
Internet. TXs are centrally located to accommodate the optimal number of physical
connections from user sites and minimize the cost of connecting to Internet Service
Provider backbones.

Transit exchanges are located close to the centre of a municipality, and are easily
accessible to major carrier facilities. Universities are typically placed inconveniently
relative to central telecommunications facilities within their communities. As such, higher
education institutions generally make poor locations for TXs.

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Larger centres, such as Vancouver, already have a carrier hotel. But smaller cities
typically do not, and the TX needs to be established. Typically, the best location for a
TX in these centres might be near city hall, library, and school complex near the middle
of town. One advantage of small cities is the ease by which fibre cable can be installed,
transforming a municipality to a digital enclave very quickly. Initiatives in the city of
Kamloops show how this can be done effectively. It is important to have the
municipalities integrate the TX into any fibre cabling plans being made, and for the
location of the TX to be optimal.

Where carrier hotels exist, such as Vancouver, it is still advantageous to end users to
have access to a TX. Even if a carrier hotel exists, it typically is set up to cater to the
needs of large service providers and their interconnection rather than the retail needs of
middle to large size organizations such as universities. The barriers to entry into
established carrier hotels for retail customers can be large, expensive, and daunting.
The TX can provide low cost entry to significant retail customers without requiring co-
location, building agreements, and the like. The TX operator takes care of most of these
issues.

10. BCNET’S DEPLOYMENT OF TRANSIT EXCHANGES

BCNET has built five Transit Exchanges within British Columbia:

• Vancouver
o Located within Harbour Centre, the carrier hotel and telecommunications
tower.
• Victoria
o Located in the basement of a downtown office building
• Kamloops
o Located in city hall, with access to the municipal fibre cable plant.
• Kelowna
o Located within Landmark Centre, a cluster of technology-related buildings
close to the town centre.
• Prince George
o Located in city hall, with access to the municipal fibre cable plant.

The Vancouver Transit Exchange is shown below, and illustrates the features of the
model. Four service providers are at the exchange: Bell Canada, Shaw Big Pipe, Peer1,
and Navigata. Allstream and Telus also have facilities within the Vancouver TX. BCNET
member sites are show to the lower right, and obtain Internet access from Bell Canada,
Shaw, and Peer1. However, some members, such as the federal Department of
Fisheries and Oceans, Environment Canada, CBC, and NRC get their Internet
connectivity from other providers at the TX. The provincial government network obtains
transit from Peer1 over a separate VLAN at the TX.

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All members and affiliates also peer together at the TX router. This router is only for
local participant peering. It does not provide peering for the service providers. This is
one of the main distinctions of a TX vs. an IX - peering is for end users, not necessarily
for providers. At most IXs, peering restrictions are exactly the opposite. End users are
not allowed to connect, and only inter-provider peering is acceptable.

VANTX is an excellent example of a vibrant TX. Users obtain transit from an assortment
of providers, peer with each other, and get access to specialized networks like CA*net4
if eligible. All of this occurs over a municipal fibre infrastructure provided by Urban
Networks, Teraspan, and others.

FIGURE 3 - THE VANCOUVER TRANSIT EXCHANGE

The other provincial TXs are shown in the figure below. Although these are smaller and
less developed than Vancouver, there is significant activity happening in each centre. In
Prince George, an Advanced Networks Task Force has formed to determine the best
way to leverage city-owned fibre and the local TX. In Kamloops, the city has installed
fibre from all municipal facilities, hospitals, schools, and libraries, and connected them
back to the TX located in city hall. The Kamloops Community Network (KCN) phase 2

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(see http://www.kamloops.ca/kcn/index.shtml) is being planned to increase the reach of

the fibre plant.

FIGURE 4 - OTHER BCNET TRANSIT EXCHANGES

11. THE BENEFITS OF TRANSIT EXCHANGES

Transit exchanges delivers a number of benefits to organizations that connect:

• Cost savings
• Optimized local performance
• Enhanced local collaboration
• Increased economic opportunity as a technology hub
• Improved reliability due to multiple redundant connections to the Internet

The TX provides redundant services or multi-homed access to multiple service

providers ensuring against any sudden loss of Internet service. Users can choose from
one or more service providers at any TX.

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This bandwidth marketplace has a direct influence on the costs of Internet transit. The
graph below shows that since the creation of BCNET TXs, the unit cost of Internet
transit measured in sustained Mbps has dropped by almost a factor of 10, and capacity
has increased fourfold. Overall transit costs by BCNET core members has decreased
by nearly 30% over 3 years. The figures for the last year on the chart are estimates, as
new contracts with upstream providers will be negotiated. It is expected that the trend
will continue.

Transit Cost and Capacity Trends

1800
1600
1400 Capacity
1200 (Mbps)
1000
800 Total Annual
600 Cost
400 ($1000s)
200
Unit Cost ($
0
per Mbps)
04

05

06

07

08
03

04

05

06

07
FY

FY

FY

FY

FY

Organizations that include research in their mandate may be eligible to gain access to
the regional advanced research network as well as the global research network, which
provides connections to researchers around the world. Access to these specialized
networks can be supported over the same link that connects and organization to the TX,
leveraging the infrastructure, increasing value, and lowering costs.

12. CONNECTING TO AND USING A TRANSIT EXCHANGE

In communities where BCNET has built TXs, BCNET obtains dark fibre for its research
and education members, providing for greater network customization, flexibility and
bandwidth. A minimum of 4 strands is usually obtained, but 24 strands connect UBC to
the Vancouver TX.

Organizations enter into a contractual arrangement for services at the TX. Since the TX
is housed in one physical location, each user must secure one physical communication
link or dedicated fibre into the Exchange.

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TXs allow user sites to access various ISPs through a single physical connection,
eliminating the need for building multiple circuits to their site. Through the TX, ISPs can
offer greater bandwidth to multiple user sites via one large capacity channel. Another
advantage is that this arrangement makes it easier for an organization to switch ISP
services at the Exchange. A software change at the TX Ethernet switch is all that is
needed, as the service providers utilize VLANs to implement individual Internet
connections.

Any organization can connect to a TX, but only research and educational institutions get
access to private advanced network facilities. This is a good example of how virtual
network providers (the advanced optical network for research and education - ORAN -
in this case) can deliver specialized services to customers using the TX.

BCNET has ORAN connections (typically 10Gbps or more) between all of the TXs in the
province. The network is shown in the figure below. This is a private network only
available to approved research and education institutions. Internet transit traffic is not
allowed on these links. BCNET members obtain their Internet transit traffic from local
providers at their closest TX.

FIGURE 6 - BCNET ADVANCED NETWORK

BCNET also connects to the national research network, CA*net4, provided by

CANARIE. BCNET members also get access to this network, which touches down in
Vancouver and Victoria, as shown in the figure below.

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FIGURE 7 - BCNET AND THE CANARIE NATIONAL NETWORK

13. TRANSIT EXCHANGES AND THE RISE OF THE VIRTUAL NETWORK

OPERATOR

TXs enable an entire new class of service providers to emerge. These have been called
Virtual Network Operators (VNOs). VNOs do not own any facilities, but integrate various
pieces to deliver service to customers. A VNO could construct a private WAN for an
organization by obtaining fibre from customer sites to a local TX, connecting the TXs
with a virtual circuit (e.g., MPLS tunnel with QoS) through an ISP, and ensuring that
VLAN tags are carried appropriately across TX switches. The VNO could deliver
Internet connectivity locally at each TX, or haul it back to a single site for redistribution
there. The VNO would require little or no facilities, and could even outsource network
operations [14].

One such VNO is Rackforce Hosting, which is headquartered in Kelowna. Rackforce is

making plans to use the TXs to offer a wide range of services across the province. In
this way, a small company can project a national or international presence to serve, for
example, a local growing high technology industry, which increasingly requires global
reach and connectivity.

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The TX can also serve as a hub for next generation service providers, and in particular,
content distributors and aggregators. TXs are generally tightly tied to a set of data
centres which can house distribution servers. Google-like distributed servers are simple
to set up, and can use special private networks akin to the VNOs described above. The
BCNET ORAN or CA*net4 is a similar model for putting together a virtual private
network over which content distributors and aggregators can push objects as close to
the consumer as needed. In the case of higher education, the content distributor is a
scientific instrument or database owner, and the consumer is an individual researcher.

BCNET is considering offering virtual router services at each TX such that VNOs would
implement complete packages for potential customers. The TX operator becomes a
virtual co-location operator as well, but without the extensive data centre operations
required to be a full co-location site. Routing might very well transition to a service, and
away from a hardware base.

VNOs, sophisticated end users, willing service providers, and a strong municipal fibre
network all contribute to the incredibly rich variety of services available at the TX. The
TX becomes a hub for innovation, and a spot to host the next generation of services
and networks. The TX represents an important structural change to the way network
services are constructed and delivered to the consumer.

14. CONCLUSION

New application and peer-to-peer services are creating the need for multifunctional,
symmetric, flexible high capacity networks. Current network structure has not been
designed to accommodate the new usage patterns. Universities and their researchers
are actively engaged in new ways of data sharing and collaboration that require a
different approach to network infrastructure.

BCNET has successfully created five transit exchanges, connecting institutions with
metropolitan fibre. The transit exchanges are retail centres that provide robust, market-
driven Internet access from a set of competing providers, links to specialized networks
such as CA*net4 or the provincial government’s SPAN/BC, as well as unlimited local
peering. Virtual networks can be created at various layers of the protocol stack with
ease, and in the future will be completely software driven.

The transit exchange is an integral building block for the last mile in creating next
generation networks for communities.

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[5] Cho, K., Fukuda, K., Esaki, H., and Kato, A. The impact and implications of the
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[6] Committee on Broadband Last Mile Technology, Comp. Sci. and Tel. Board,
National Research Council. Broadband: Bringing Home the Bits. National Academy
Press, Wash., D.C, 2002.

[7] St. Arnaud, B. Bjerring, A., Cherkaoui, O., Boutaba, R., Potts, M. and Hong. W. Web
Services Architecture for User Control and Management of Optical Internet Networks.
Proceedings of the IEEE, 92(9), 2004.

[8] Xu, W. and Rexford, J. MIRO: multi-path interdomain routing. In Proceedings of the
2006 Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols For
Computer Communications, SIGCOMM '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 171-182, 2006.

[9] Labovitz, C., Ahuja, A., Bose, A., and Jahanian, F. 2001. Delayed Internet routing
convergence. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 9(3), 2001.

[10] Berkowitz, H. To Be Multihomed: Requirements & Definitions. Internet Draft draft-

berkowitz-multirqmt-01.txt, IETF, 1998. See also
http://www.academ.com/nanog/feb1998/multihoming.html for comments on a 1998
NANOG presentation.

[11] Packetfront, http://www.packetfront.com

[12] Invisible Hand Networks, Merkato System, http://www.invisiblehand.net

[13] Columbia Mountain Open Network (CMON), http://cmon.ca

[14] Vanco making its mark in U.S. - U.K.-based virtual network operator is winning over
multinationals. Network World, August, 2005. See also http://www.vanco.com.

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