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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

For ordinary singlehomed users who don't get the "a lot". As an example cloudflare has 40Gbps of capacity to the SIX in Seattle. I would guess that they also have direct, at minimum, 10Gbps PNI peering sessions with other huge ISPs in the Pacific Northwest which never see the SIX fabric. So probably add another 20 individual 10GbE circuits at bare minimum to that 40 figure. All of which helps spread the traffic load out rather than shoving it all down a few pipes.

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https://peeringdb.com/net/4224

that's just the public stuff!

For huge entities like this and other top 5 CDNs it makes me wonder how many full time staff positions are dedicated to buying rack space, power and crossconnect in major colo facilities worldwide. How many contract law experts, telecom real estate analysts, etc. That before you even get into things like experts in Japanese contract law. Just for rack, power and facilities at layer one of the osi model before any networking happens.

I don’t know the exact number, but you’re off by about an order of magnitude roughly. Cloudflare peering is in the terabits/sec range globally.

At many non profit IXes the interface size to the fabric is public data and published by both the IX and on peeringdb. Such as at the SIX. They have not yet upgraded to 1x100GbE.

Another regional example, they have 20Gbps to the VANIX.

What is opaque is the size and scale of their PNI peering, which parties generally don't share. For example in a mid sized city where Comcast is the cable monopoly they almost certainly use a 100GbE interface direct to Comcast for just that isp.

Yes the scale is terabits globally. But it is highly decentralized.

> But it is highly decentralized

Isn’t that the entire point of a CDN, to have decentralized POPs scattered globally?

Yes, they may max out at 100gb per public IX in most cases, but they still have lots of 100gb peers all over the globe.

Yes, it's exactly the point. What I was saying is I am not off by an order of magnitude, I know exactly how big they are. Two ASes I do engineering work for peer directly with cloudflare.

> I am not off by an order of magnitude, I know exactly how big they are.

Your post implied a total of 200-400gb, the real number is 10x that (otherwise known as “order of magnitude”). I’m not disputing your knowledge or experience, but the post as written has issues.

no, my post was quite specifically about a single IX point in one geographical location, and was accurate. You confused me talking about interface sizes and counts at one IX point with cloudflare as a whole.

What difference does it how much they have as peering in one specific geo? Are you going to posit then that that is their capacity in that geo? I hope not, as Cloudflare has their own backbone and could easily and efficiently exchange traffic outside the geo depending on peering agreements.

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