This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Christian Koch, Founder and Editor at Foundations, a modern publication about digital infrastructure. He is a veteran leader in the digital infrastructure space having held several leadership and operational roles at companies such as Microsoft, Twitter, and Globix. In this episode, Christian explains the landscape of interconnectivity, including its history of development, current infrastructure, expansion, evolution, and use throughout the United States.
This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Christian Koch, Founder and Editor at Foundations, a modern publication about digital infrastructure. He is a veteran leader in the digital infrastructure space having held several leadership and operational roles at companies such as Microsoft, Twitter, and Globix. Christian was most recently the Head of Interconnection Product at DataBank, and previously a Director of Product Management at Digital Realty and PacketFabric. In 2016, Christian Co-Founded the New York Network Operators Group, a non-profit organization that aims to connect network operators and technology professionals through educational events and programs.
In this episode, Christian talks about how his interest in information and curiosity to learn about as much as he could, led him to become both a generalist and expert in the world of digital infrastructure. He explains the landscape of interconnectivity, including its history of development, current infrastructure, expansion, evolution, and use throughout the United States. Christian also delves into what he thinks edge is becoming, the different layers of networking, and how the cloud will become a primary infrastructure for workloads in the future.
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“Ethernet seems to be having this resurgence because it's probably the one technology that's is flexible as virtual machines in the cloud. You can basically scale it up and down. Whereas, you can go from a five gigabit ethernet circuit to a 10 gigabit ethernet circuit by issuing some configuration commands and making that change. Similar to how you can configure or reconfigure a virtual machine. Whereas, a wavelength isn't really like that, because it's all about dedicated connectivity. So if you think about ethernet share connectivity, that's what cloud computing is at the end of the day anyway; the shared infrastructure platform. So it makes it a little bit more flexible, and a little bit more easy to scale and deliver those services.”
“I don't even like using the word edge anymore because, you know, because I think it really boils down to it's just a place like geographical place. Right? You know, it doesn't have to do with networks. It doesn't have to do with clouds. It didn't have to do with computing. It's just, you know, kind of the perimeter between almost like interconnection.”
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(02:00) Getting Interested in Technology
(04:30) Path to Networking and Interconnection
(05:50) Explaining Interconnection
(09:15) Backbone of Interconnectivity in the United States
(15:43) Public versus Private Networks
(18:45) Internet as a Fabric
(21:06) Network as a Service
(32:00) State of the Edge
(37:30) Internet Trends
(40:30) The Price of Shipping Data
(44:00) Future Trends
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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies - unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
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Connect with Christian on LinkedIn
[00:00:00] Narrator 1: Hello and welcome to Over the Edge.
This episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Christian Koch, Founder and Editor at Foundations, a modern publication about digital infrastructure. He is a veteran leader in the digital infrastructure space, having held several leadership and operational roles at companies such as Microsoft, Twitter, DataBank, PacketFrabric, and Globix. In 2016, Christian Co-Founded the New York Network Operators Group, a non-profit organization that aims to connect network operators and technology professionals through educational events and programs.
In this episode, Christian talks about how his interest in information and curiosity to learn about as much as he could, led him to be both a generalist and expert in the world of digital infrastructure. He explains the landscape of interconnectivity, including its history of development, current infrastructure, expansion, evolution, and use throughout the United States. Christian also delves into what he thinks edge is becoming, the different layers of networking, and how the cloud will become a primary infrastructure for workloads in the future.
But before we get into it, here’s a brief word from our sponsors…
Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies - unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting Dell.com for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
And now, please enjoy this interview between Matt Trifiro and Christian Koch, Founder and Editor at Foundations
[00:01:49] Matt Trifiro: Christian, how you doing today? I'm good. Matt, how you doing?
[00:01:51] Christian Koch: I'm doing terrific. One of the things I like to ask people is how they got into technologies.
[00:01:56] Matt Trifiro: Is there anything in your childhood or your formative years that [00:02:00] really hooked you into technology
[00:02:01] Christian Koch: as a career? Wow. Let's see, you know, if I think back probably when I was young in maybe third or fourth grade, I was just getting my hands on a computer and ended up building one myself. And that was probably what really kicked me off and got me into what, what was it, what was it you built?
[00:02:19] Christian Koch: It was back then. It was a 4 86 and I think it was like one of the first Pentiums. My memory escapes me, but you're younger than
[00:02:27] Matt Trifiro: I than I am. my first computer is a 65 0 2, an eight fit 65 0 2. See, I don't
[00:02:33] Christian Koch: even know what that is. Oh, it's what
[00:02:35] Matt Trifiro: was in the original Atari 2,600 game machines. And then the Atari 400 original apple two.
[00:02:40] Matt Trifiro: Okay. Original two had a 65. Oh two little, little, eight bit processor. It's fun. It's fun to program in that. Did you program computers or you just
[00:02:47] Christian Koch: more on the hardware? No, no. I was much more on the hardware side. They like putting things together, have like this, you know, curiosity that I've kind of figured out and just like to poke around and learned how things work.
[00:02:57] Christian Koch: And
[00:02:58] Matt Trifiro: when did the internet [00:03:00] become part of your computer
[00:03:01] Christian Koch: life? I've discovered bulletin boards. Right. Pre-internet you know, like comper. Yeah. So even pre even pre that. Right. And I forget the names of the software that people use major BBS or things like that, maybe. And, and she'd just go on and there's nothing there.
[00:03:17] Christian Koch: It's like maybe some text based games and, you know, a bunch of information. And I think the information it was is what I was really drawn to and just learning, cuz that, cuz that curiosity that I had was just like, I just wanted to learn about everyth. Right. And so I, I much more consider myself like much more of a generalist than I've had some areas where I'm probably much more expert level in, but I do consider myself much of a generalist, cuz I'm so interested in just how everything in the world works or why things are the way they are.
[00:03:45] Christian Koch: That's really cool.
[00:03:46] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. I I'm that way too. Although I'm probably coming more of it from a communication standpoint than a technical standpoint, but I, I certainly like the technology a lot.
[00:03:53] Christian Koch: You're a big science fiction. No, actually, that's probably what, yeah, that's probably one of the really [00:04:00] odd things about me.
[00:04:01] Christian Koch: My fiance is a big science fiction fan. And so she's always like, how are you such a big geek? And you don't like science fiction. So, you know, I've not seen star wars, star Trek, you know, like none of that stuff. Wow. Well, Hey science fact, right? . Yeah, exactly.
[00:04:18] Matt Trifiro: That's great. Well, I think that the people that know you tend to think of you as an expert in interconnection, which is a specialty and it is part of the internet.
[00:04:25] Matt Trifiro: How'd you end up in networking and
[00:04:26] Christian Koch: interconnection. Good question. Well, when I got into working in the industry, it was when hotels were just bringing. They call it high speed back then high speed internet into rooms, which was a dongle or cable attached to the desk, which eventually was all cabled downstairs to an NPO OE or whatnot.
[00:04:49] Christian Koch: What's an NPO OE. Uh, it's like a point of entry, minimum board of entry, medium point of entry, kind of where telecom equipment would sit kind of entrance facility or server room server, closet it [00:05:00] closet. Plenty of ways to describe it in layman's terms. And that would be where there was a bunch of DS.
[00:05:04] Christian Koch: Equipment. And that's what powered the high speed internet for hundreds of hotel guests.
[00:05:10] Matt Trifiro: That's amazing. So was the DSL over the phone line into the room or was the DSL over the phone line to the central office or, or branch office? Yeah.
[00:05:19] Christian Koch: So it was ethernet cabling up to each room and then all the DSM theam and all that kind of equipment downstairs in the basement.
[00:05:25] Christian Koch: Then I had no idea what it was. Right. I was literally a technician. I was cabling and plugging things in. And that really kind of got me interested in, so let's talk about
[00:05:35] Matt Trifiro: the internet. So when we talk about interconnection, like what's, what's your definition of interconnection
[00:05:40] Christian Koch: at its simplest form? It's the connecting of two separate systems.
[00:05:46] Christian Koch: That system could be a network. It could be a computer system and that are basically under separate and distinct autonomous control. So Matt's computer network and Christian's computer network. So how do we [00:06:00] interconnect ourselves? Right in, in a technological world and all that we connect. Via messaging or phone lines or video, or like this podcast right now.
[00:06:09] Christian Koch: Right. And then, so if you take that to the internet, it's about two networks connecting with each other. Well, I mean, the definition of the
[00:06:15] Matt Trifiro: internet is a network of networks, right? So, yeah. So it makes very many sense that interconnection would be a fundamental quality of the internet. When you think about interconnection, you tend to.
[00:06:23] Matt Trifiro: Think of also not just straight connecting of networks, but IPS, these typically privately owned buildings that used to be network access points, but are now owned by clinics and others where lots of networks connect. How did that come about? And what's important about that. .
[00:06:40] Christian Koch: Yeah, so I mean, a lot of it's predated my entrance into the industry, right.
[00:06:44] Christian Koch: They were building NSF net and I'll get a lot of this wrong. Right. So if you wanna know the real history, go look in Wikipedia or something that speech from URF, but they had these network app access points when NSF net was kind of built. And how do we interconnect these different research networks around, [00:07:00] around the country?
[00:07:01] Christian Koch: And so network access points were. Right. And sh nap for short and as kind of these networks evolved, and the internet was kind of born. We then had what was called an internet exchange point. Right. And it was basically the same thing and it just kind of, you know, evolved in its naming fast forward a, a little bit further, the term internet exchange point no longer really referenced the building, but referenced the facility.
[00:07:28] Christian Koch: As in the switch that was providing the function of switching packets. And in the early days, this was ATM. Right. And you had things like may east and may west, right. And a couple other network access points or IPS across. The country and even across the world, some of the oldest IXP is actually a Hong Kong internet exchange back in the nineties of London, internet exchange am six, which is the Amsterdam internet exchange all in the nineties.
[00:07:58] Christian Koch: And then you had Equinix, which was born right [00:08:00] with being in Washington, DC, Northern Virginia area. And they had this internet exchange. And now I have these carrier network dense co-location facilities.
[00:08:08] Matt Trifiro: When you say a carrier network dense, what
[00:08:10] Christian Koch: do you mean by that? Yeah. So if it's a service provider, Telecom carrier, typically the same thing to me, right?
[00:08:18] Christian Koch: It's a company that provides communications infrastructure, whether that's, it's kinda a measure of reliability and scale. Yeah. So it's a company that provides telecom equipment and delivers broadband. Lets we call it now or backbone, connectivity, which. Would more fall actually under a network service provider.
[00:08:37] Christian Koch: So an NSP, right? So your ISP is delivering internet to users, residential or commercial at home. And your NSP is kind of connecting all those ISPs, right. That backbone, which a lot of people are starting to get away from and starting to actually use the term network fabric these days. Yeah.
[00:08:54] Matt Trifiro: So we'll, we'll, we'll start talking a little bit about that.
[00:08:57] Matt Trifiro: Draw some map of in just [00:09:00] of the United States and where's the backbone.
[00:09:02] Christian Koch: It, it does go all over the place, right? And typically fiber takes the path along railroad tracks. And so you could easily see that when some of the earlier fiber networks were kind of building these building up some earlier service providers were building these networks out.
[00:09:15] Christian Koch: But if we look in terms of interconnection and where these data centers are, that are network dense, right. They have a lot of different networks connect. At them, they are typically New York, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Jose in the bay area. And most of the major kind of tier one NFL cities as like people like to call them.
[00:09:43] Christian Koch: There's another level down where there's more of that. Right. And it's a little more localized, right. So if you go to Reno, there's a carrier hotel in Reno. Local networks connect at, or if you go up to Milwaukee, there's a carrier hotel with a few networks. And obviously they're not as dense
as
[00:09:59] Christian Koch: [00:10:00] these interconnection points or interconnection hubs in Northern Virginia, Dallas and so forth.
[00:10:07] Christian Koch: But regardless, they're still there for these networks to come and interconnect with each other
[00:10:12] Matt Trifiro: metaphorically in my head. There's a big difference between a, a hut and an exchange, right. yeah. I mean, so you, you listed. Five or six cities. And there's actually a lot more NFL teams than that. Houston has an NFL team and it doesn't have a major interconnection point as far as I know.
[00:10:27] Matt Trifiro: Why is that? And is
[00:10:28] Christian Koch: that good? So on Houston first, actually Houston does have one it's just small, right? Because like, so first off, let's see. So Houston has one carrier hotel and it has some data centers that are fairly network dense, but typically this is all really also based around popul. And that's how networks end up gravitating toward those locations.
[00:10:47] Christian Koch: Right? It's the largest city in Texas. Right, which is kind of crazy. Right. But I guess as a lot of these cable MSOs and telecom operators were building out their networks, they had these places [00:11:00] where they interconnected and they built out massive infrastructure. And the way they designed these networks is they had different tiers themselves as well.
[00:11:07] Christian Koch: Right. So they had that. IP edge, which is typically where they're connecting with other networks and allowing that traffic to be exchanged. And that is typically then aggregating maybe some smaller facilities, right? Like a central office or a mobile switching centers, depending on which type of network we're talking about.
[00:11:24] Christian Koch: And then you've got to obviously keep going down the line, right. And then there's huts and things like that. And inline amplification sites and towers, and this whole big string of infrastructure. Actually makes up the internet. Now, when we talk about
[00:11:37] Matt Trifiro: a backbone, so these major interconnection points are often called tier one cities, and we talk about a backbone.
[00:11:42] Matt Trifiro: Is it safe to say that the backbone is what's connecting these tier one cities together?
[00:11:46] Christian Koch: Yeah, technically. Yeah. So a provider like. XO or Verizon and builds out fiber. Right? And so they've got long haul fiber. They've got Demetri fiber and regional networks and all that. So they end up connecting these data centers and [00:12:00] colocation facilities, right.
[00:12:01] Christian Koch: And all types of other infrastructure, right. Whether it's antennas and rooftops or towers or huts, right. They've got this, just looking across to the United States and you look at a map and you got a fiber outcome from west to east and it touches all kinds of different. Infrastructure and facilities along the way and tier two, tier three, but there's not a lot of action there.
[00:12:21] Christian Koch: It might just pass through, right. It might just need to pass through for amplification to go to the next site. And
[00:12:26] Matt Trifiro: intuitively like the fastest path between two points would be a straight line and for geography, or as you said, where the train tracks are, because that's where it's easily fibered cause they have easements and rights away.
[00:12:37] Matt Trifiro: So the packets on the internet, I tend to think of two things. One is best effort, so you're not guaranteed. It's gonna get to someplace, although. It's miraculous that it does gets all over the world. Right. Which is power of the internet, but is there a Phantom. Internet, that's sort of controlled by the cloud companies.
[00:12:54] Matt Trifiro: I talk, I hear about the, the growth of the private backbones. And so when I think of a map of the internet, I [00:13:00] tend to think of the, the large, this is almost the, the hub and spoke map of, of the internet, like an old airport diagram, right? Where you, these feeder airlines and then you get on a major hub to hub.
[00:13:09] Matt Trifiro: And yet I think if you overlaid Amazon's network and Google's network and Facebook's network, you would end up with very different paths that many of us don't get to use, unless we're a customer of theirs, is that.
[00:13:21] Christian Koch: So, yes. Yeah, there's some of that going on right now. And it's, I heard some 45%
[00:13:26] Matt Trifiro: of the traffic on the internet might be on private backbones.
[00:13:29] Christian Koch: I've never heard any stats around it, but I would probably say that's, that's kind of believable because I think if we take a quick. Look back at interconnection, right. And there's different types. There's Hey Matt, we're gonna put an agreement in place. We're gonna have private interconnection between us, or we're gonna say Matt, you're not really worth it for private interconnection, your traffic's of low value to me.
[00:13:52] Christian Koch: There's not a lot of it. let we can just connect over the public internet exchange, right? Where everybody connects to a single switch or a, a [00:14:00] group of switches that are distributed within a Metro area typically, and then allow, then we can establish, peering over that. Right. So two different types of interconnection, but then if we talk about, so if you, if you consider that, yeah, that's a, a lot of the interconnection in the us is.
[00:14:15] Christian Koch: and if we think about these cloud infrastructure and some of these hyperscalers that are building large networks, then yeah, that's pretty believable, especially as you see the adoption of cloud and the proliferation of cloud and how many cities and how many data centers and how many companies are using.
[00:14:36] Christian Koch: Then yeah, they've, they've built some pretty big networks and in some cases like Facebook or beta, whatever, they're calling themselves these days, they are getting into building their own fiber infrastructure. Yeah. The last mile. And yeah, last mile, but not even last mile, but even middle mile, middle mile.
[00:14:51] Christian Koch: Right. So, and I, I think that business is called middle mile infrastructure. Facebook connectivity program has done a lot of really cool and really interesting things. [00:15:00] And I made a lot of really interest investments. And so what they're doing there is building out last mile and they're breaking out into local communities to provide fiber networks for broadband.
[00:15:09] Christian Koch: So really cool stuff. If you're interested in that, go over to Facebook's blog and check it out.
[00:15:13] Matt Trifiro: Why are these private companies doing that? I mean, in some ways it's the dirty little secret of the internet, right? Cause we all think of it as this public network, we all have access to. And certainly as a consumer, it feels that way I can connect.
[00:15:24] Matt Trifiro: Any IP address pretty much and request a webpage or, or whatever I do on the internet. And yet, if I were to look at where every one of my packets go, I mean, I, I spent an hour today shopping on amazon.com and I'm guessing a good percentage of the traffic that I generated and that it sites generated on the back end, went over a private network, help us figure out how to think about that.
[00:15:44] Matt Trifiro: The private versus the public and. And like what that really
[00:15:47] Christian Koch: means. Yeah. So, I mean, look, I think with anything, any business does having control over what you can achieve. With the infrastructure lands pretty high on a list [00:16:00] of things that are valuable to the business. Right. And then comes economies of scale, which means lower costs and brings efficiencies to operating leverage.
[00:16:09] Christian Koch: Right. But then when you talk about some of these other companies, it's like, okay. User acquisition, right. I mean, and in terms of someone like Facebook, why are they going and investing billions of dollars in Africa? Well, look how big Africa is and like how many people are people using
[00:16:21] Matt Trifiro: Facebook. So make messages on Facebook and watching ads.
[00:16:25] Christian Koch: So I, yeah, I mean, look, and it's unfair to say that that's the main driver and I think it's, it's one of the drivers. Right. But as they've grown over the years, Gain that experience and in building infrastructure and building data centers and understanding what they need. And the fact is that at the scale they operate at and they're growing at a lot of the public or private businesses that are building this infrastructure, can't always support them.
[00:16:51] Christian Koch: Directly or don't have the cash or don't wanna make the investment to build themselves. There might only be one or two users of it, right. That might be a Facebook meta or [00:17:00] a Google. Right? I mean talk about,
[00:17:02] Matt Trifiro: or, or they're trying to offer a higher, higher quality of service. And, and using a best effort network that somebody else largely controls you're right.
[00:17:08] Matt Trifiro: So yeah. Control controls a really good point that really does seem, seem valid and people throw out like cloud on ramps and like, what is that? Well, it's just getting onto Amazon's backbone or Google's backbone faster yeah. And paying them for the privilege. But you now you have a, a presumably a higher quality of service network because it's, it's under more control
[00:17:27] Christian Koch: and end.
[00:17:28] Christian Koch: Exactly. And it's funny, you mentioned the OnRamp. That language is that's, it's, it's being used a lot more these days because of the cloud on ramps that came about, which exactly, as I said, are that's the physical equipment and gateway to get onto the cloud provider network. But I was reading a article the other day last week, which was like the 27th anniversary.
[00:17:51] Christian Koch: Of the bill gates memo that he sent about the internet being a title wave. And he talked about the economics of an [00:18:00] internet connection from an office, right? It didn't, it wasn't billed on usage or consumption. It was, Hey, back then, I mean, who knows what it was, then I want a T1 or a T3. Right. And you get all that bandwidth and you connect to the internet, but he used it as we'll have all these OnRamps from our offices and from companies to the.
[00:18:20] Christian Koch: So one of the things you
[00:18:20] Matt Trifiro: said, so again, I'm thinking of the, the public backbone and I guess to some ex the private backbone as a, as a hub and spoke system, and you said that now some people are trying are starting to look at it like it as a fabric. And when I think of a fabric, I think of a more uniform kind of meshed approach to the network.
[00:18:35] Matt Trifiro: And tell me what that means.
[00:18:36] Christian Koch: The internet is a fabric. Well, I mean, I'm gonna go and tell you one thing, and I'm gonna say it's mostly a marketing term but I think it's software defined networking. I think, I think really the first time. I can recall seeing network fabric or the word fabric was when some of these hardware vendors and networking protocols came out to make it [00:19:00] easier to build networks at scaled.
[00:19:03] Christian Koch: and were, were a big mesh, or maybe there was something with like gloss in there, or when you had a bunch of switches of routers and then, you know, connected them and you connected them. It was kind of kind getting away from the hierarchy of network design, where you had a core and access and an edge layer and then network fabric is kind of why is that?
[00:19:22] Christian Koch: You can kinda, why is that? I. I think it's more about scaling really, as, as networks got larger, right? And protocols evolved and technologies evolved there became new and better ways to actually operate the network with depending what protocol you were using, whether it's BGP, which is kind of used to announce the IP routes that.
[00:19:43] Christian Koch: Your company uses for its applications and its servers and its network to either your own network or other networks, it can be used externally or internally. And so I think we've seen some evolution with that, that make that a little bit easier and scalable to build networks. And so we kind of, I think Juniper might have even been the [00:20:00] one that started calling things like a network fabric.
[00:20:02] Christian Koch: And so I think people just apply it to anything these days. I mean, it's the neat
[00:20:05] Matt Trifiro: metaphor and it's current use might be different than it's original use. One of the things that I tend to think about is a fabric is it's it's. Solid piece. Right. And it's foldable. And what that makes me think of is, is not only a network at scale and a network that can get anywhere, but a network that can get you anywhere through multiple choices and can be reconfigured.
[00:20:28] Matt Trifiro: It can be folded and unfolded to do it. And I know that part of your recent job history, you worked at Megaport and then packet fabric. Which our network is a service. And when I think of, well, what does Megaport do? Or what does, what does packet fabric do? Well, packet fabric, look at that. .
[00:20:45] Christian Koch: Yep,
[00:20:46] Matt Trifiro: exactly.
[00:20:46] Matt Trifiro: Right, right. So, so why don't, so why don't you tell me a little bit about network as a service and how it works. and who uses it and
[00:20:57] Christian Koch: why? This is a really, uh, an [00:21:00] interesting question, because over the last few years we saw this term network as a service, you know, abbreviated NA the same way as like SAS or IAS or whatever come about, but it applies to several types of companies and products and they don't all necessarily fall within the same bucket or operate and compete in the same.
[00:21:22] Christian Koch: But essentially what it is is delivering network services in a similar fashion as the cloud. So on demand with, so what's, what's a network service that I might buy on demand. Yeah. So, um, let's see connectivity. Okay. The first one, what kind of connectivity? Yeah, you can get cloud connectivity, right? So that's interconnection from your private network, your private infrastructure to a cloud.
[00:21:48] Christian Koch: You could get connectivity from your infrastructure to an internet exchange point. You can get connectivity from your infrastructure, to your [00:22:00] infrastructure in a different location. We're gonna even try to even stay away from data center these days, because infrastructure is becoming so ubiquitous that it doesn't necessarily have to be a data center, right?
[00:22:10] Christian Koch: It could be, it could be OnPrem. Like it could be a tower, it could be anything, but for the purposes of what's going on these days is use cases, data center to data center. Data center to cloud data center to exchange point. If the data center you're in, doesn't have an internet exchange point. Some of these companies like packet fabric and Megaport can actually deliver that service to you.
[00:22:32] Christian Koch: So you're basically consuming connectivity as a service, right? And you can spin it up. You can spin it down, you can pay for what you use, whatever floats
[00:22:41] Matt Trifiro: your, let me, let me say that back to you in my simpleton model of the world. I'm I'm sitting here in my house connected on at and T fiber. And I feel like I'm connected to everything that I could possibly need to be connected to, but let's say I'm an enterprise and I want a different kind of connection.
[00:22:57] Matt Trifiro: I want to get to what, to a cloud [00:23:00] faster or to one of my other facilities faster. Or is, is it about privacy? Is it about speed? Is it about resilience? So I, I think what you're saying is it allows me through software on a consumption basis to configure a network. that's at least mine for the time being as opposed to when I send it on a packet, leaves my house it's on the internet.
[00:23:21] Matt Trifiro: Is that essentially what's going on is I can configure what amounts to my own network.
[00:23:28] Christian Koch: yeah. Yeah. That absolutely. That's, that's a great, that's a great way to think about it. There's I think there's a lot of different ways to think about it and there's, you know, they're all probably right. But I mean, for, for the purposes of what we're talking about, I think that's a great way to describe
[00:23:39] Matt Trifiro: it.
[00:23:39] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. And, and how does that work on the back end? Because I mean, packet fabric is a software company mostly. Right. How does my private network, what does it get assembled from and how does it get. And how is it? How's that
[00:23:50] Christian Koch: delivered? Yeah. So think about it in terms of building blocks, right. And just like any other telecommunications network or network service provider builds out this network.[00:24:00]
[00:24:00] Christian Koch: These companies like packing fabric and Megaport have essentially done the same thing. We start at the bottom and say, okay, well we need fiber and okay, so let's get the fiber. And in some cases, fiber might be too expensive. So then you buy wavelengths, which is lighting up on the spectrum of dark fiber and being able to carve out whether it's a hundred gigabits or 10 gigabits and, and connect what you need to connect.
[00:24:20] Christian Koch: So company
[00:24:20] Matt Trifiro: like pack fiber or, or Megaport will, will sample some capacity either by lighting their own fiber or getting some lit wave.
[00:24:27] Christian Koch: Yeah, exactly. So, so you're there on the bottom, right? So now you've, you've put that equipment on it. You've got some equipment now you need. Your ethernet equipment and IP equipment.
[00:24:36] Christian Koch: So your packet based network sits on top of the optical network. And so now we're getting somewhere. So now you've got that and you've got that connected and you can connect different locations and different data centers typically using ethernet these days. Cause that's, that is kind of when I talk about this a lot lately, I talk about it.
[00:24:51] Christian Koch: Ethernet seems to be having this resurgence because it's probably the one technology that's as flexible as. virtual machines in the [00:25:00] cloud. Like you can basically scale it up and down, whereas, and by, by, and by that, I mean, you can go from. Five gigabit ethernet circuit to a 10 gigabit ethernet circuit by issuing some configuration commands and making that change similar to how you can configure or reconfigure a virtual machine.
[00:25:19] Christian Koch: Whereas a wavelength isn't really like that, cuz it's all about dedicated connectivity. So if you think about ethernet share connectivity and that's what cloud computing is at the end of the day anyway, right? It's a shared infrastructure platform. So it makes it a little bit more flexible, a little bit more easy to scale and deliver those service.
[00:25:33] Christian Koch: So we've got that ethernet layer. We, we go from there. Right. And now, so now on top of that, we've got the software layers and that could be a controller, an orchestration engine, meaning that's all of the automation, that's all the software that's making this work, whether it's configuring the network or whether it's delivering services for customers.
[00:25:55] Christian Koch: You've got that software layer. Now that's really controlling the network. No more network engineers [00:26:00] logging into a network device like a router or switch. Manually making changes. to do something well, how do I specify my, what I want? That's great. So like the next layer, then on top, we've got the API layer and some people do this differently, but you know, I think the more common approach is that it's in an API first approach.
[00:26:19] Christian Koch: The API layer sits in on top and you can then build a web portal for customers to use that actually consume the API. And so the way that looks is you. API layer. And then you have a portal that's using the API to configure the network, orchestrate the network, deliver services, or customer can actually just use the API if they don't want to use the web portal.
[00:26:42] Christian Koch: And then they can click buttons and specify what they wanna configure. So they go in, they say, I wanna connect from location a to location Z location a is typically their, their connection into that platform, into that. And location Z could be a cloud. It can be another data center. It can be one of the whatever other location or [00:27:00] service the platform offers.
[00:27:01] Matt Trifiro: Would it also be safe to say that the companies like that are network as a service? Another way of looking at their business is they first assemble some dedicated capacity and then they carve it up on demand, essentially network slices, but shared infrastructure for their customers on.
[00:27:19] Christian Koch: Absolutely. So you got, you know, let's, let's say a very simple network and let's say we're like, I don't know Chicago to New York, to Dallas, to San Francisco.
[00:27:28] Christian Koch: Let's say that's a network and you've got customers and that wanna buy services. So I wanna buy connectivity to clouds. They wanna buy connectivity between those data centers. So you go out and you buy a hundred gig capacity between each of those. And then on the back end, you manage that capacity and you kind of sell it off and you can over subscribe, right.
[00:27:44] Christian Koch: And make sure that you have the tools to manage and monitor it, just like any other infrastructure business. And just kind of go from there. You just continue to scale and you continue to offer these new services. Customers can spin it down. They can sign a contract for a long term. They can use it for 10 days and.
[00:27:57] Christian Koch: Turn it off, right? Because it's, well, it's [00:28:00] flexible. It's, it's, it's elastic in that sense, the same way cloud was like, Hey, you don't need to build all of these networks. You don't need to buy this in, in this term. You don't need to buy fiber. You don't need to buy your own wavelengths because typically companies would go and buy that and would sit on use.
[00:28:13] Christian Koch: They use like 10% of it. And like, that's it. And in a similar fashion to computing infrastructure before the cloud is how many companies out there actually had the sophistication and knowledge and talent to capacity plan and forecast, and really manage capacity in a way where they weren't wasting money.
[00:28:31] Christian Koch: The reality is not many. Yeah. So,
[00:28:33] Matt Trifiro: so a NAS company can specialize in those kinds of practices and forecasting and capacity planning and utilization. Resilience and quality of service. And me as an enterprise, I can just, I just farm that out and may end up spending a lot less because I'm not sitting there purchasing long
[00:28:52] Christian Koch: term unused capacity.
[00:28:54] Christian Koch: Exactly. Yeah. And they're taking a step further, right. As these platforms continue to evolve and you're seeing folks like [00:29:00] Megaport, you know, bringing in SDWAN into the, I was explanation. Yeah.
Say
[00:29:02] Matt Trifiro: what you mentioned that connectivity. Simplest service. What are some of the other network services that
[00:29:06] Christian Koch: I, I can get on demand?
[00:29:07] Christian Koch: Yeah, that's still connectivity, right? I mean, it's essentially integrating what Megaport is doing is integrating with the SDWAN provider. So if you're an enterprise and you've got your office and you want, you have SDWAN, you can actually connect with Megaport then access that whole ecosystem, access those cloud on ramps directly from those offices or whatever on-prem location that you want.
[00:29:27] Christian Koch: However, connectivity is at one service. If we take it a step further. We look at someone like Equinix that's essentially has their own, they have a fabric that does the same kind of things. Then they have network edge, which is essentially I call that network as a service as well, because it's basically virtual infrastructure for firewalls or routers or switches.
[00:29:49] Christian Koch: Right. So you can actually go to an Equinix data center in Chicago, deploy your network, deploy a couple servers. Then you say, man, I really. Reach my customers and get a little bit more [00:30:00] control over my traffic in Dallas, but you don't wanna spend the money so you could spin up a virtual network router, connect it to the fabric, connect to those ISPs or partners or customers directly.
[00:30:11] Christian Koch: And then connect that back to your physical infrastructure in Chicago. And get rid of all of that CapEx that goes into deploying a new site. That's the next step. And there's, and, and we can go even further, right? Because I was thinking about this actually over the weekend. And I think one of the true network as a service platforms is actually CloudFlare.
[00:30:31] Christian Koch: And that's because I was gonna say, are
[00:30:33] Matt Trifiro: these, are they eventually gonna be competed with CloudFlare? Yes. You made my mind, or I read
[00:30:36] Christian Koch: yours. Yeah. So when you look at it, right, like CloudFlare offers DNS. Yeah. Right. And security services and yeah. Right. And all these other network based services. So. It's now you start, if you start thinking of it that way you say, wow, like packing fabric, Megaport like, it's just connectivity.
[00:30:53] Christian Koch: Like how big is this really gonna get? Where on the other hand you have CloudFlare, who's got storage [00:31:00] databases and serverless edge computing and network services like DNS and IP sec tunneling and deep, a scrubbing and all, and like real networks as a. They have their own SDWAN it's sassy type of play.
[00:31:13] Christian Koch: Right. And they integrate with those people as well. So they say, oh man, it's probably a matter of time before they do similar offerings for the enterprise. And I think they've even talked about it. If you look at what they talk about, and they've got this whole Tam expansion, that really is about attacking the telcos and, you know, PLS market, which is like 45 billion.
[00:31:31] Matt Trifiro: I see the same blood bath that you do yeah. In the future. Yeah. In the future. So let's talk a little bit about edge. It was interesting. You mentioned Equinix is edge services. And as you know, even though I've spent the last five years of my life touting edge, I'm actually starting to move away from it because I think it's gotten it's, it's gotten overtaken by the marketers, including me, but it's interesting because there there's a little bit of truth there.
[00:31:55] Matt Trifiro: I. The edge that equi cares about is the edge of their network, which [00:32:00] stops at their data centers more or less. And somebody else's edge is different. How do, how do you think of not the edge necessarily, but how do you think of that space between the customer's premises and the. And the nearest, the nearest exchange point.
[00:32:14] Matt Trifiro: Mm-hmm
how
[00:32:14] Christian Koch: do you think of that space? Yeah, I just don't, I don't even like using the word edge anymore because I think, I think it boil, I think it really boils down to it's just a place like geographical place. Right. And it, it doesn't have to do it networks. It doesn't have to with clouds, it doesn't have to do with computing.
[00:32:32] Christian Koch: It's just kind of. Perimeter between almost like interconnection, right? Like that's an, if me and you interconnect, like that's our edge, right? That's our, that's our edge where we connect to external parties and third parties. Right. And different networks. And this is, I've only really started to think about this, uh, recently, because I started to see so much stuff and people just say edge.
[00:32:52] Christian Koch: And I say, well, what, what do you mean by edge? Right? Is it, are you talking about edge computing? Are you talking about edge networks? Are you talking about mobile [00:33:00] net? Like, cuz it's all different, right? Like the edge of a mobile network is very. Then the edge of a terrestrial network or a space network, right.
[00:33:09] Christian Koch: Or a enterprise network, and then there's different types of edges. So it's just. Let's be specific about what we're talking about. Is it edge computing? And now we're talking about very specifically the compute, right? Because these days, everybody wants to just go and say, I'm an edge data center. Like cool.
[00:33:26] Christian Koch: Guess what, everybody in the, every data center in the world's edge data center want it to be, I, I have a
[00:33:30] Matt Trifiro: great one for you. So, and this is really what started to shift my thinking. I mean, I have a podcast named over the edge. is for the, for the first year of, of doing this and ran, ran around and asked everybody for the definition edge.
[00:33:40] Matt Trifiro: And if I. 80 people. I got 90 different answers and it was just kind of this let's collect it. And then I co-founded state of the edge to try to define some of this. But the more interesting question that I've come up now is what's the difference between edge computing and on-premises
[00:33:53] Christian Koch: computing. That's a good question, because I've seen it.
[00:33:56] Christian Koch: I've seen this touted when we think of one specific [00:34:00] example, which is. Switch then the project they announced announced with FedEx, FedEx. Yeah. And it's using FedEx real estate for edge computing. The only thing I don't know is that open to third parties or is it just for FedEx? For FedEx? Right. And so essentially it's on prem and you're and you're right.
[00:34:18] Christian Koch: A lot of people I've talked to have talked, about'm gonna put this container. Or a modular data center in the parking lot or nearby a warehouse or retail or whatever the case may be. And we're like, well, why wouldn't you just put it inside at that point? Like you have a warehouse? Well, I would say the opposite.
[00:34:36] Christian Koch: Why can't I
[00:34:36] Matt Trifiro: just get that from the internet? Like I get everything else.
[00:34:39] Christian Koch: That too. Yeah. Do you really need it there? And I, I, I think I do understand some of the applications like manufacturing and smart manufacturing and some of these things where you get into it, where you do need some of that compute.
[00:34:48] Christian Koch: And, but what are people doing for that? They're putting an AWS outpost inside the factory floor or whatever the case may be. I think it's still really early and we're still really watching these kind of use cases come up and say, does this make [00:35:00] sense? People are gonna try. where are we with that? Right.
[00:35:04] Christian Koch: So at the end of the day, with this, with the whole edge thing, to me, it's just on premise. I mean, there's no reason to call it edge. You're all of a sudden just saying, Hey, I've got a server closet with all this stuff and that's my on-prem or maybe it's a big server closet. And it's like, they call it their corporate data center, but it's got 20 racks inside their office in Manhattan.
[00:35:21] Christian Koch: Are you all of a sudden, just gonna go start calling that edge since it's 20, 22 or well, so,
[00:35:27] Matt Trifiro: so I've actually gotten some interesting answers to this question. I mean, most people look at me and say, there isn't that much difference. Right. Which is like, ding, ding, ding. You've definitely learned something when, when the top people in the industry say that, but I got one good answer, which was, well, the control plane extends all the way back to the centralized cloud.
[00:35:45] Matt Trifiro: Okay. That's meaningful. It's not all definition of edge computing, but it's certainly an interesting one. And the other one is what's exciting about for a lot of people about edge computing. And I just did air quotes for those people listening is that [00:36:00] they. they imagine that all of these services will be delivered in the same way that cloud is delivered.
[00:36:06] Matt Trifiro: So it's almost like edge as a service is, is what's interesting to a lot of people cause otherwise it is just on premises computing. I mean a rack of computers on an oil Derrick. is rack of computers on an note there. And we've been doing that for decades. That's not edge computing.
[00:36:21] Christian Koch: yeah, yeah, no, that's a great, that's absolutely a great point in, in talking about where the control plane and how that's all integrated.
[00:36:28] Christian Koch: Right. And obviously network fabrics and all that stuff. And come into that picture right. At a, at a first, yeah, it's part of the network. I mean, if you
[00:36:34] Matt Trifiro: look back at the history of, of the word, the phrase, edge computing, the farthest, I could trace it back was a paper that the founders of Akamai wrote, which they were talking about.
[00:36:43] Matt Trifiro: This interconnected edge, like where is the edge of the internet? And I agree, depending on whether you've got last mile and other things that that's a little blurry, but it is an interesting question. It comes back to what we're talking about, about interconnection, right? Because you think about what are today's tier one cities, right?
[00:36:59] Matt Trifiro: Some of [00:37:00] them where, where. Yesterday, tier two cities like Denver, maybe, right. Mm-hmm are arguably, almost a tier one city. And so do you see the internet being pushed farther and farther out? Do you see that trend? I think I see that trend, but I wondering if you see that trend.
[00:37:14] Christian Koch: Yeah, I do. And I think one of the obviously indicators here is it's not tier two data centers or anything like that.
[00:37:20] Christian Koch: It's actually AWS local zones. So, which is. for those that don't know connected to their private backbone. yeah. So you've got, you've got your AWS cloud, which is in a bunch of different regions around the world. If we talk about the us, we are talking about Northern Virginia Columbus, Ohio, and Northern California for simplified purposes.
[00:37:43] Christian Koch: Now local zones are basically going down to tier tier one and tier two markets. And essentially giving some form of compute and AWS services, which then actually just tether back to a parent region. So Los Angeles was the first AWS [00:38:00] local zone they launched and that's tethered back to AWS, us west, which is in Oregon.
[00:38:04] Christian Koch: And so that local zone offers a handful of services. Right. The highest
[00:38:08] Matt Trifiro: demand, the need for the highest performance low as latency services. Yeah.
[00:38:12] Christian Koch: Yeah, exactly. And so that's, I think one of the best indicators, of course, along with the edge cloud CDN type of platform, like Akamai, and, but they have a different reason, then it's all about.
[00:38:24] Christian Koch: Squeezing out every ounce of performance that you could, right. Embedding those cashes into ISP networks, getting close to users, no matter what the scenario, right? Because their deployment model was also really not that capital intensive, right? Like if you're deploying into a server provider network, you say, Hey, here's a couple servers, or here's a rack of servers depending who you are.
[00:38:46] Christian Koch: You've got folks like Netflix who does this with open connect and Akamai and CloudFlare does it. And Google does it with the Google global cash. And so. They've been pushing down further and now they've got new services because content [00:39:00] delivery is actually quickly becoming the least amount of revenue from these big CDM providers.
[00:39:06] Christian Koch: I say, now CDM is dead. It's just a service. You've now got cloud infrastructure platform, edge cloud, whatever you want to call it. Delivering security service cuz security services, compute services, all kinds of different things. And so I look at the AWS local zones. That's bringing the cloud down. You've got computing now in Los Angeles and I don't know, 30, 40, 50 cities now globally that they've deployed and announced.
[00:39:31] Christian Koch: Yeah, it's, it's hard to
[00:39:32] Matt Trifiro: imagine that not that long ago, five years ago, like if you wanted to start up a, an C two incident, Amazon you in the us, you had two. Us Western us east, right? I mean, there's some availability zones, but essentially you had two places. You could do it and now maybe you can do it 50.
[00:39:48] Matt Trifiro: That seems like still a tiny number. It's really interesting how that's gonna change now. One of the things. And, and I'm interested how you, you think about this. One of the things that I think is going to drive a lot of this is it's not driving it already [00:40:00] is the internet to date has primarily been about humans, consuming content.
[00:40:05] Matt Trifiro: I mean, that's been the high bandwidth, right. And so that's why the, the CDNs have been so popular. You catch the Netflix movie out near you, right. But we're moving into a world where. Machines are gonna be generating data far more data than is actually sitting on all of Netflix servers and Amazon servers today.
[00:40:21] Matt Trifiro: And it's expensive to ship that data around. And especially as more data creates more congestion and more demand, the price is gonna go up. It's it's really interesting. And so, in fact, I, I, I sat next to the CTO Seagate at a dinner, and we did this exercise where we imagined a factory that generated a petabyte of.
[00:40:39] Matt Trifiro: And we calculated that it would be faster and more economical to store that on hard drives and put them on a truck than it would be to, to ship and ship it over the
[00:40:50] Christian Koch: internet. Welcome to welcome to filmmaking in 2022 still. Yeah, it's,
[00:40:55] Matt Trifiro: it's a phenomenal thing. And really, so there's, there's two answers to that.
[00:40:58] Matt Trifiro: One is you pay a lot of money [00:41:00] or you ship a lot of hard drives around or. You don't send the data very far, which I guess speaks to why you wanna push compute. I mean, it's a lot easier move one server out than it is a petabyte of data back to the core. Yeah. How, how do you think about it? Tell me how you think about that.
[00:41:15] Christian Koch: It's I mean, I think that's a tough problem. Like I said, welcome to filmmaking 20, 22, right? I mean, they've obviously got a bunch of other security and things like that, where they're just like, I'd rather have someone, this trusted person we're tracking it. We know where the, we know where the, where the movie in the film and all the, and all that data's going.
[00:41:29] Christian Koch: But I think that you're seeing and you're gonna see right. A lot of data and a lot more data generated, whether it's in a suburban area, a rural area, a Metro area that has to go somewhere first to be processed, just based on the sheer amount of it. Like if you're going to be using cloud and you want to get away from sending hard drives and things like that, where do you send it?
[00:41:54] Christian Koch: Where does it go first? And the cloud has to come closer.
[00:41:56] Matt Trifiro: These have, have to, to come on premises or
[00:41:58] Christian Koch: near premise. [00:42:00] Ex. Exactly. And so you'll have a lot of that that happens on prem, right? Like, I mean, let's think about like, like autonomous vehicles is a great one. Like the that's being stored on the car. I think crews wrote this up really well a couple years ago, which is the datas generated stored on the car, goes to the parking lot and it plugs in and uploads that data then to the cloud.
[00:42:20] Christian Koch: They've got fiber and what, I don't know what I mean. It would, I would, it would be super interest to see what they're doing in that aspect, because that's what they're doing right. Is we store the data on the car and then they go upload it. And this is applies to probably a lot of different industries and a lot of different functions.
[00:42:34] Christian Koch: Right? I mean, smart city infrastructure comes into top of mind and there's probably plenty of other things, but so you've gotta have, you know, the cloud comes closer. Right. And that's what ADAS local zones is doing. Some of the other folks have. Introduce anything like this yet, which is interesting, like Microsoft and Google.
[00:42:50] Christian Koch: I know Microsoft has introduced something, but not really similar in that way. AWS is really ahead of the pack again. And so you've gotta get that somewhere first. And then each of [00:43:00] them have this cloud infrastructure that you could go lease as servers like AWS's outpost. So you can get this whole outpost rack and I can get one here and put it in my apartment or put it in OnPrem in the office.
[00:43:13] Christian Koch: That's what I wanna wait, wait to the, the one R U and
[00:43:15] Matt Trifiro: two R
[00:43:15] Christian Koch: units come out, be a little more practical and so they, and then they have servers as well, right? Yeah. And Google actually, Google did, did have something like this, I guess, good distributed edge, which is like their outpost kind of thing, where they've got a rack unit, a full rack, and they've got like a two U or.
[00:43:32] Christian Koch: One use servers that you can get as far as distributed edge. And I think it's a lot of telco of 5g and, and stuff. That's really driving some of that. So let's look at the future.
[00:43:40] Matt Trifiro: What are the kind of obvious trends that you see at least obvious to you that you think are kind of inevitable and then pick a couple things that you just think are maybe a little crazy and controversial.
[00:43:49] Matt Trifiro: So let's start with
[00:43:49] Christian Koch: easy ones. Ah, okay. Easy one. The world will be a cloud. What do you mean by that? What does that mean? And so what I mean by that is you've
got
[00:43:57] Christian Koch: a lot of people, a lot of [00:44:00] companies still. Putting workloads into data centers that likely belong in the cloud. Right. They're and so you take your small it shop and they go put a rack or two in a data center.
[00:44:13] Christian Koch: Do they really need to do that? I, I would
[00:44:15] Matt Trifiro: never wanna own a data center or, or lease one I just want, right. Yeah. Or just
[00:44:19] Christian Koch: even just colo. Right. Do they need to go to Equinix and put one or two racks in colo and connect to two service providers and that's. Probably not. So I think that over time, a lot of that type of business is gonna churn from your, your multi-tenant colo providers and over time as well, you've gotta offer something that's differentiated.
[00:44:41] Christian Koch: Now Equinix is the best example to talk to as being a proxy for this because they saw it coming and they continue to innovate and evolve that platform to capture that demand. So they'll get those colo workloads, but they're more valuable and they're [00:45:00] more meaningful because of the digital infrastructure services that they also offer, whether it's a virtual route.
[00:45:07] Christian Koch: Well network fabric connecting them to the cloud. So it's a multi hybrid cloud workload, and then other kind of services, like bare metal. They bought packet. And now, okay, now I've got my infrastructure, but eventually you don't have to. So I think a lot of that's gonna go away and you're gonna go be able to go into a data center and say, Okay, I'm gonna buy some bare metal in Chicago, Dallas, New York, Los Angeles.
[00:45:31] Christian Koch: I'm gonna buy some network fabric, connectivity, and ports. I'm gonna connect that all together. I'm gonna connect it to my cloud, which is my primary infrastructure workloads. And it's gonna be Google. It's gonna be Amazon. It's gonna be Microsoft and I don't need to own any infrastructure. so that's one of the big things is I think that will, those kind of values, the world's a cloud.
[00:45:50] Christian Koch: I like that I might steal it. yeah, the world's a cloud. And then if you take the next step, so the next big thing I'll say is you'll, you'll gonna see a lot more vertically integrated [00:46:00] network fabrics. Hmm. Right? More. So let's talk about like what Megaport and packet fabric are doing, and then look at what CloudFlare is doing.
[00:46:09] Christian Koch: With all these network as a, all these network services, selling networks as a service. Right. And then think about all of your traditional legacy service providers like XO and Verizon and Windstream and all these guys. Well, it's all about connecting locations, right? And being able to capture that demand because there's not many locations that actually are representing such a significant.
[00:46:34] Christian Koch: Part of the market. So you've gotta be everywhere. Everybody's got different requirements. So I see those fabrics now connecting those clouds and ex and those cos and extending out to all kinds of different infrastructure and locations, whether that's, I mean, look, it just simply like what the clouds are doing with satellite.
[00:46:49] Christian Koch: Like now they've got ground station as a service and things like that. So where is the network fabric for the enterprise that connects all of. That says, well, here's my enterprise [00:47:00] headquarters. Here's my branches. Here's all this. And someone might say, well, that's, SDWAN they say, that's not really SDWAN right.
[00:47:06] Christian Koch: SDWAN is kind of one of the earlier pieces of this puzzle that allow you to add security and control performance of different types of network actions and a bunch of different locations. But what's the real fabric that lets you spin all this up and down. That's connecting all of the cloud, but it's not.
[00:47:22] Christian Koch: SDWAN what. . Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I don't think it's, I don't think it's actually here yet. And that includes mobile networks. Okay. What if you've got a private 5g network and your factory or whatever, and you want to connect that to the cloud and you want to connect it to your branch or your headquarters or Equinix and your colo.
[00:47:38] Christian Koch: And so where's that ubiquitous network fabric that just connects all of this. And, but also at the same time, what it does is allows customers to use different service providers. really right. And, and hedge their reliability and resilience multi-cloud and multi network. right. And so that, yeah, isn't something that's [00:48:00] really been done while some of these fabrics have different network providers providing underlying capacity.
[00:48:06] Christian Koch: Not many of them allow you to choose some of them do. I mean, you can go into an Equinox and connect to Verizons last mile network. Right. And, and do some things there. And some of the folks have some stuff like this, like packet fabric, you can do it with cult and, and a bunch of stuff like that. But none of them are really VIT in that.
[00:48:22] Christian Koch: Hey, I want to make sure that my connectivity between these two locations are using different providers, but at the same time are not driving my performance. and are actually creating value instead of saying, well, here I've got two providers, but this one takes a really long route and degrades the performance.
[00:48:41] Christian Koch: Well, even simpler
[00:48:42] Matt Trifiro: than that, rather than picking the providers, just have a resilience style and have some AI yeah. Pick the providers, have a, a cost style and, and a resilience style and to tell the AI how to balance
[00:48:53] Christian Koch: them. Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny when you say that Matt is, there are so many dials and knobs and levers.[00:49:00]
[00:49:00] Christian Koch: In networks and in network software like Cisco and Juniper and, and all that, that probably are not being used to the fullest potential or even exposed to a customer that might want to change something like that. Yeah.
[00:49:14] Matt Trifiro: I bet you, I bet. You're right. Yeah. It's interesting. I've started in our circles in my job.
[00:49:19] Matt Trifiro: I've been talking to people about digital twin systems. Mm-hmm . And so if you think about, I mean, all these network component, Could be digitally twined, right? Yeah. And you could monitor all the traffic and run predictive AI models on it and tweak some knobs and run some other predictive AI models. And, uh, I wonder how much of the, the meta fabric is gonna be part of the delivery of the fabric?
[00:49:41] Matt Trifiro: Probably quite a bit. Okay. So how about
[00:49:42] Christian Koch: something controversial, controversial, maybe not controversial. Okay. So we've got the world is a cloud. We've got the ubiquitous network fabric, I guess. And I don't know if. This might be a little controversial, but carrier hotels are dead. Okay. What does that mean?
[00:49:59] Christian Koch: Well,
[00:49:59] Matt Trifiro: what does the carrier [00:50:00] hotel? Cause we talked, we mentioned it three or four times. We didn't describe it. We just said it's a small IX point.
[00:50:05] Christian Koch: right. So look, carrier hotel is typically a multi-tenant building. right. So in a, in a populous city, right? So let's use New York. Mm-hmm for example, you've got a carrier, you've got a building.
[00:50:19] Christian Koch: You've got this building called 60 Hudson. It's a carrier hotel, meaning it's a single building with multiple tenants operating co-location facilities inside. So you've got digital Realty. You've got Hudson inter I, man, I don't know their name. It was called data grid. They just called themselves Hudson. I.
[00:50:36] Christian Koch: It's not an internet exchange. We'll call it Hudson. And a whole bunch of other people operating the building from carriers, right? So like crown castle or Zao have their own colo facility, because guess what? As you grow all that fiber, all that has to go somewhere has to terminate somewhere. It does. And it, it, it becomes a lot.
[00:50:53] Christian Koch: So I think that carrier hotels are dead based on the fact that it's [00:51:00] complex. They're very complex because of all these different locations inside controlled by different third party entities, meaning there's no standard cost for connecting, right? So if you want to go between digital Realty in the same building and the Equinox and the same building, it might cost you more than the service you're buying.
[00:51:20] Christian Koch: It might cost you three times as much as the service you're buying. Cause you had to pay some guy to run, to
[00:51:25] Matt Trifiro: run, to pull fiber through a conduit, probably.
[00:51:28] Christian Koch: Right. Exactly. Those kind of things. Some, some union
[00:51:31] Matt Trifiro: guy.
[00:51:32] Christian Koch: Right? So, I mean, there's a lot of components to go into, right? You pay the building. If you're the operator, you pay the building for conduit.
[00:51:38] Christian Koch: Or you pay the building or end you pay the building for the fiber riser going between floors, which a lot of times is charged based on the foot linear foot. And, and you've gotta make that 99.9% profit on your cross connect. So that drives the cost to that up. And so if we think about it, we say, well, okay, The [00:52:00] costs are high.
[00:52:01] Christian Koch: The, the connectivity is complex. The power is high, right? You're now in a, a very tight, very dense building in a large Metro area. Typically, maybe a smaller one as well. And there's typically just not a lot of room to ex. Fan. I mean, remember these buildings were back in the days, like for telecom, when it was voice and like infrastructure might have been big, but it had nowhere near.
[00:52:24] Christian Koch: So these, these long man windowless
[00:52:25] Matt Trifiro: buildings you see when you drive, drive around.
[00:52:28] Christian Koch: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, if you think about it like that, right. Like, okay. What's it replaced
[00:52:32] Matt Trifiro: with, if it's, if, if the karaoke hotel's gonna die,
[00:52:34] Christian Koch: what, what replaces it? Yeah. So, I mean, lemme tell you like, and this has been happening, right?
[00:52:38] Christian Koch: So let's look, we're talking about New York. So we said 60 Hudson is a carry hotel there. Right. And then you've got one 11. avenue one 11 eighth avenue. So that was bought by Google. And over time since they bought it, they would not renew data center. Operator's leases. So like they want this for office, right.
[00:52:56] Christian Koch: And they be, and I, and look, I used to live in a neighborhood over there. They've brought [00:53:00] this whole, or they've been building this whole campus where they've been buying all these buildings in that area. Like they do keep everybody close. They don't want data centers in there. And you even see this with Equinix leaving carrier hotels.
[00:53:11] Christian Koch: Right. So the, the next thing is a purpose built data center in the Metro and New York, again is the best example because what we saw at, in the beginning, When Google bought 1 11, 8 F was Equinix, really accelerate its sea C hub, which now has tons of financial networks, tons of other networks. And remember when you're in a Metro like that deployment for carrier or service provider, doesn't all look the same.
[00:53:36] Christian Koch: They've gotta have a core. In a couple places, but not every place. And so sometimes those extensions as they may call them, or they may call them edge sites, they all aggregate back to the core. So guess what? No, you, you win a deal and you're like, oh, excited. And you know, we're gonna get someone that's big name, social media, or hyperscaler, and they're gonna put their equipment in your data center and then they're gonna back haul it [00:54:00] all to Equinix and sea caucus.
[00:54:01] Christian Koch: Right. So. It look, this will take a long time to play out. They're not gonna go away. There's still probably gonna be a place for fiber because there's already enormous amounts of fiber in them, but they're just too expensive to build and evolve infrastructure in. As, as it continues to grow at the rate it's grown up.
[00:54:18] Matt Trifiro: That's good. One. We'll watch for that. Hey, Kirson this, this has been an awesome conversation. This has been a heck of a lot of fun. If people wanna find you online, where can they find.
[00:54:26] Christian Koch: Yeah. I say the best place is to check out my email newsletter. So it's, uh, at foundations.email, I read it every time it comes out.
[00:54:33] Christian Koch: Thank you. And you can of course, find me on LinkedIn or anything like that, but subscribe to the newsletter reply, ask questions, have a chat I'm always open for always up to. Talking shop and hearing about new perspectives and learning. So check it out. That's awesome. Thanks Christian. Thanks Matt. That does it for this episode of over the edge.
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