[FCIX] State of the Exchange - 2020

[Kenneth Finnegan]

Howdy y'all!

It's been about two years now since we started the Fremont Cabal
Internet Exchange project, so I figured it would be a good time to
send out a recap on what's been happening.

Growth for FCIX continues to be good. We have 84 networks currently in
our participants database, and several more applications still in
process. The pace of new members got to the point this year that I
gave up on announcing each new member on this mailing list. I figure
our participants list is public (https://fcix.net/participants/) so
feel free to scroll through that and send any direct peering requests
that you like.

>From an infrastructural perspective, nothing has significantly changed
in the last year. We out-grew the first 7050S-64 in FMT2 just from a
ports perspective, but our sponsors all came through, so Arista
provided another 7050S-64 switch and a 40G DAC cable, and Flexoptix
provided FOUR more trays of 1G/10G optics for more member ports. We
are coming close to filling this SECOND FMT2 switch, but I made sure
to get another switch from Arista before the quarantine shutdown, so
we have the physical hardware needed for our foreseeable growth. It's
just... sitting in my apartment until we need it.

Hurricane Electric continues to be a fantastic DC host for FCIX. Their
willingness to waive the cross connect fee on first fibers into FCIX
means that getting new networks on-net continues to be easy and
frictionless since there's no billing involved between anyone to
anyone else. It's nice when peering is an engineering decision and
finance doesn't get involved! ;-) Hurricane Electric also continues to
provide FCIX space, power, and dark fiber between their two FMT
facilities, which is a major factor in what makes it possible for us
to provide this service for free.

Normally, June is when I pass the hat around for FCIX's "pay what it's
worth to you" business model to cover our ARIN, licensing, hosting,
etc fees, but donations from new members this year have already
covered our op-ex several times over! This is great, since it means we
can spend the surplus funding on things like marketing, urgent
hardware replacements if any needs come up, etc.

In light of FCIX already being fully funded for 2020, I am going to
ask that no existing members contribute to us financially this year.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has made the Internet more important than
ever, a more fundamental need that has also been put under strain is
the food security of the less fortunate in our communities. Decide
what FCIX has been worth to your organization over the last year, and
instead of sending it to us, please contribute it to a food bank or
pantry either local to your organization's geography, or the Tri-City
Volunteers food bank local to Fremont, CA:
http://www.tri-cityvolunteers.org/donate/donate-funds/

Personally, Phirephly Design, AS7034 will be sending them $200.

As always, thanks for your participation in FCIX; your network being
on-net is really what helps us more than anything else to be a
valuable small corner of the Internet. Here's to another year of
moving some bits around!
--
Kenneth Finnegan
Technical Director, FCIX