Latin America POPs

[carrerasg]

Just curious as to why there are no POPs in South America.  Not just HE, but there don't appear to be any IPV6 tunnelbrokers with a presence here. (at least not to my knowledge)

[broquea]

Just curious as to why there are no POPs in South America.  Not just HE, but there don't appear to be any IPV6 tunnelbrokers with a presence here. (at least not to my knowledge)

For us, we just haven't started expanding our backbone out there yet. Perhaps at some point we'll find good pricing on transport (not transit) and look at availability in locations. Until then we're concentrating our efforts on the large planned power upgrade to the Fremont-2 facility as well as our new Hong Kong PoP.

As for why other providers with allocations from LACNIC haven't started, I couldn't answer. However we do provide LACNIC themselves with a BGP tunnel for their connectivity when they travel doing presentations regarding IPv6.

[snarked]

Except for spam from Brazillian dial-ups, the Internet really hasn't penetrated South America much.  Global Crossing is the only large LD network I've seen with paths to SA and to southern Africa on their network map, and even so, no more than 5 cities per continent.

If HE were to start penetrating south, I bet the first place would be Mexico City, with two paths - one from Texas and one from California.  In California, the path from Los Angeles would probably pick up a POP in San Diego along the way (and maybe a second POP in the LA area in Orange County).

As one of my Usenet peers is in Panama, there's a place for another POP along the way to SA, but remember that many of the Central American countries are not currently stable (El Salvador and Honduras still have guerilla/civil wars), so laying cable will be expensive.

I think that a northern route, linking Seattle/Vancouver to Edmonton or Calgary (AB), then across to meet up with the new Toronto POP (as an alternate path should the southern paths go down) might be a better, earlier plan.  (Don't forget to make stops like at Regina (SK), Winnipeg (MB), and Thunder Bay (OT)).  Extending from Toronto to Montreal, then through New England to Boston (a 3rd common hopping point for Europe) follows that idea.

Also, I don't recall other networks going up the Pacific Coastline to Alaska (which perhaps could be on an alternate path towards Asia).

[testmonster]

Hurricane is happy to expand anywhere we can get capacity at a reasonable price to, and there are exchange points and networks that want to buy transit.

The price of wholesale Internet transit is correlated with the ongoing costs of paying for the circuits that compose the transit providers network.

Specific areas of the world have a limited number (i.e. one or two) of oceanic fiber optic cable systems, which means the price of circuits on that cable system cost very high prices compared
to paths with alot of competition (i.e. New York to London is cheaper than Miami to Sao Paolo by a factor of 100 for comparable circuit sizes, I'm not joking).

Certain markets have a limited number of network service providers, for various reasons having to do with regulation, licensing, and politics.  Traditionally, telephone carriers were national monopolies, and called PTTs.  Even though things have changed alot in 30 years, you can get an idea of if there is stuff going on in the background by the existence or nonexistence of competing IP transit networks in a country.

Brazil has alot, so it would seem to be good place to expand if the cost of getting there ever goes down.