Malaysia’s First Internet Exchange
I felt good when reading this news, at sinchew.com.my(chinese). Sorry that I was unable to find any source in English. Only this post stated that “Malaysia Internet Exchange will be in use end of this month”, which literally means “End of November, 2006″.
What is Internet Exchange? While digging at wikipedia, Internet Exchange was redirected to “Peering“, carries the meaning “voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the customers of each network”. You can check it out yourself.
According to Dato’ Seri Dr. Lim Keng Yaik, Malaysia’s Internet is operating on oversea’s upstream providers. Equinix’s site has a press release about TM being their subscriber. So you can tell from here, TM Net is only a traffic middle-man in our country, they have to pay their upstream providers based on Internet bandwidth usage.
So, how will this Internet Exchange help us? I don’t know, seriously. As you can see in this TM News, this so called “MIX”(Malaysia Internet Exchange) is co-operated by TM Net and Jaring. Yeah, TM Net again. What do you expect? From wikipedia, an Internet Exchange will bring following improvements:
- Increased capacity for extremely large amounts of traffic (distributing traffic across many networks).
Yes, we definitely want this. Higher capacity means lower congestion. - Increased control over your traffic (reducing dependence on one or more transit providers).
Does this mean more traffic shaping on us? - Improved performance (attempting to bypass potential bottlenecks with a “direct” path).
Hopefully, the mechanism itself can work properly, regardless of the operators. - Government regulations, or the desire to avoid the appearance of being a monopoly
Check this out! I hope this means more ISPs will be in service sooner or later.
My doubts
- Will we, the end user, suffer any service down time when the experts implementing this MIX ?
- Do they(TM Net, Jaring), have any kind of backup plan when someone inside screws thing up ?
- Is our government going to open the “Last Mile” for any other ISP?
If the #3 of my doubt is not going to happen, I’m afraid this Internet Exchange is not going to help us much. Well, let’s wait and see.
