[menog] RE: [ncc-regional-middle-east] Peering

[Baher Esmat]

On Thursday, August 02 Bill Woodcock wrote:

>You'll note that the Middle East is the only developed region of the world 
>other than Mexico that doesn't already have a fairly dense distribution of 
>IXPs to support communications growth, at this point.  Rather than 
>thinking about one location, I think you'd need to be looking at thirty 
>or forty, to reach parity.  And if you think about what thirty or forty 
>cities in the Middle East means, you don't have to do any winnowing: it 
>includes every capitol and every major city in the region.  Just as every 
>capitol and every major city in Europe and East Asia have them.

>So if the question is "Jeddah or Dubai" the answer is "yes, and Manama and 
>Doha and Muscat and Riyadh..."


Let me second this thought as well as previous comments that linked between
building IXPs and the well established business and regulatory environments.
The success of IXPs is pretty much reliant on competition and regulatory
frameworks in place. 

I must also say that I was a little bit puzzled with parts of the discussion
as it appeared to me that we're not differentiating between the Incumbents
like STC, Batelco, ect., (those incumbents are also ISPs) and other smaller
ISPs. My understanding is that the Incumbents whether they have bilateral
peeing among themselves or peer via IXPs, they remain the big guys who own
the customers as well as most of the traffic. The small ISPs on the other
hand have to have their own IXP setups and hence be in better positions to
negotiate better deals with Incumbents, or with upstream providers if ISPs
are allowed to connect directly to them.

-Baher