Carrier Hotels Are Sexy Again | Hacker News Reader

Carrier Hotels Are Sexy Again

datacenterfrontier.com

22 points1SockChuck8 comments

For those like me who'd never heard the term "carrier hotel", it's what is (in the US perhaps much more commonly) also known as a colocation center.

A carrier hotel is a specialized colo though, in that they offer easy connectivity to multiple carriers, and space is at a bigger premium (many of them are in city centers). If you have a large presence in an area, you might put most of your equipment in a suburb warehouse style building for cost reasons, and then get a dedicated connection from there to a small routing installation at a carrier hotel where you have lots of cross connects.

If you only have a small presence, and need a lot of cross-connects, then it probably makes sense to build out in the carrier hotel.

A colo center is a place to put servers, that probably also offers you Internet bandwidth and/or a variety of existing ISPs to connect to. The second variety is called "carrier neutral".

A carrier hotel is a place for ISPs and large network users to place one or more switches or routers, and bring their own connectivity together with other customers of the same hotel. Each connection is negotiated separately.

A public exchange is a place for ISPs and large network users to bring a connection, and then they generally participate in a master agreement for traffic exchange between all users.

A private exchange is any other peering agreement between ISPs.

More peering sites/IXes than colo in this case.

though in reality, today the difference is almost academic. One Wilshire is known as _the_ carrier hotel in Los Angeles, if not all of the US. The 4th floor meet-me room was widely known as the most expensive real estate on the west coast, at one time.

While many large, international networks still setup inside One Wilshire at a premium, if I just need cross connects, I can get them for exactly the same price inside Wilshire Annex -- a more "colocation for server farms" oriented building that is slightly cheaper and much larger (for individual spaces, not in total conditioned square footage, iirc).

Why do large international carriers pay the premium for being in the "carrier hotel" One Wilshire? Because they don't want to rely on CoreSite (the buildings and associated interconnection infrastructure management company) infrastructure. They want "home runs" to the other large international carriers they interconnect with and sell to.

If you aren't ATT or AWS, there is little need to be inside One Wilshire -- except perhaps for the "prestige" factor.

I think this is true in a lot of markets. 11 Great Oaks is the place to be in Silicon Valley (with PAIX and MPT as distant second and third), but it's an old, shitty building and you can't get any kind of reasonable power density. Enter 9 Great Oaks, on the other side of the parking lot, which is a modern building that has cross connects at the same price back to 11 Great Oaks.

I think there's a lot of money to be made in having modern buildings that are situated close by the dominant carrier hotels. The crazy money is still made from cross connects, but you can also charge a premium on space because it still makes more sense than running a ton of fiber to the middle of nowhere.

Hey, only one place for the FBI and NSA to strongarm into giving them unfettered access, and then they can sniff many networks at once!

Given that these are used for peering between different independent networks -- pretty much the definition of the "public internet" -- there shouldn't really be much expectation of privacy. At least not if you're smart about it.

(Network taps aside, at that level traffic can often get redirected through hostile networks via BGP spoofing.)

Hopefully any important information going through them is already encrypted.

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