Summary

  • InterLAN-IX's operator told RIPE 93 that a participant connecting in Bucharest, in another Romanian city, in Frankfurt or in Sofia faces “the same conditions so the same prices for the ports” — a deliberate refusal to put distance on the price list.
  • The same session states the cost of that refusal: the inter-PoP links holding those sites together need enough capacity for traffic and enough redundancy to survive transport failures, and the operator says this involves “a lot of costs”.
  • No published document gives the port tariff, the transport budget, or how the bill is split between association membership and commercial agreements. Equality of price is checkable from outside; its durability is not.

A price list that refuses to look at a map

Eric Andrei Băleanu of InterLAN-IX put the rule in one breath at RIPE 93: “if you connect in Bucharest, Frankfurt or Sofia, you have the same conditions so the same prices for the ports.” The exchange does not publish a tariff table, so that sentence in the session 167 transcript is the clearest statement of its commercial policy that exists.

Asked to justify it, he repeated the point and supplied the reasoning in full: “the conditions are the same so if you connect in Bucharest or in a different city or in Frankfurt or Sofia, you have the same conditions, you have the same prices, because we wanted to build an interconnection ecosystem which should be equal for everybody so everybody can access in the same conditions.”

Read that carefully, because it is unusual in kind rather than in degree. A port is a physical thing installed in a building, and the buildings are not in the same place. Frankfurt is roughly two thousand kilometres of fibre from Bucharest; Sofia is several hundred. A conventional price list would let the distant site carry some of the cost of reaching it. InterLAN-IX has decided that the distant site is not a different product. Same conditions, same price, no line item for geography.

That makes the price an instrument of membership policy rather than a description of cost. The person buying a port in Frankfurt is buying exactly what the person in Bucharest buys, at the same nominal cost, and is therefore being told something about who the exchange is for. The operator's own words are not about efficiency; they are about equality of access. Whatever else follows, the intent is explicit and on the record.

What it takes to hold that promise

The session does not stop at the price. It also describes the engineering underneath it, in terms that make the economics visible: “Extending shared layer 2 peering platform across these cities, across the cities across Romania. So this introduces additional transport and operational complexity because for the interlink, for the inter-POP links, we must provide enough capacity for traffic and also redundancy is essential to minimise the impact of transport failures so we have to ensure that we have enough capacity and resilience for this point of presence so we have a lot of costs with this.”

That passage is the whole argument in miniature. A single Layer 2 fabric spanning dispersed sites needs inter-site capacity sized for the traffic it will actually carry, and it needs that capacity twice over, because a single circuit between two points of presence is a single point of failure for every participant hanging off either end. Redundancy is not decoration in a distributed exchange; it is what keeps a fibre cut in Romania from becoming an outage in Frankfurt.

The cost structure this produces is the opposite of the price structure. Revenue per port is flat by design. Cost per port is not: it grows with the number of sites, with the distance between them, and with the amount of protected capacity the operator decides to hold in reserve. The exchange sits in the middle of that gap and funds it. The flat price is therefore not a claim that transport is free. It is a decision about who pays for transport, and the answer, on the operator's own account, is the exchange rather than the participant at the far end.

That is a coherent arrangement, and it is more interesting than a discount. It means the marginal participant at a distant point of presence is profitable to the exchange only if the average participant subsidises the link. It also means the flat price is a promise with a maintenance bill attached: every new site adds capacity that must be paid for out of margin the price list does not describe.

The scale the promise has to carry is not trivial. InterLAN-IX's own About Us page lists interfaces of 1 Gbps over copper and fibre, 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps, and states 180-plus autonomous systems present, a daily peak above 1 Tbps and 17 sites. Those are the operator's own figures on a page that carries no publication date, so they describe a scale rather than a measured series — but they are the load the flat rule has to support, and 1 Tbps of daily peak spread across a distributed fabric is a great deal of transport to hold in place.

Nine sites on the slide, seventeen on the website

The exchange's own geography is counted differently depending on who is counting. In the session it is nine: “we operate distributed exchange layer 2 platform across multiple points of presence in Romania, as you can see we have now nine points of presence across Romania.” Outside the country the same talk adds two more, one of them recent: “Sofia, we open the pop -- the point of presence in Sofia last year was opened in Telepoint... Frankfurt was built I think ten years ago or more.”

The About Us page says 17 sites. Neither document defines what it is counting. Nine points of presence plus Frankfurt and Sofia is eleven, which is not seventeen, and there is no way from outside to tell whether the difference is a fuller inventory of Romanian cities, hosting locations inside a single point of presence, private interconnect endpoints, or simply a page that has been updated more recently than a conference slide. The two counts are taken at different moments and neither carries a date that would let a reader reconcile them.

The same friction appears in the participant numbers. The session abstract's account of the talk puts the connected base above 150 networks, naming ISPs, content delivery networks and participants from Moldova, Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia and Ukraine; the About Us page states 180-plus autonomous systems. That figure does not appear in the portion of the transcript available in quotable form, so it is the operator's round number rather than a count anyone can check against a named measurement date.

None of this is scandalous. Exchange websites go stale and speakers improvise; a nine-versus-seventeen gap is exactly what you would expect from a fabric that grew city by city while its marketing page grew independently. But it matters for the specific claim being tested here. A redistribution rule is only as good as the inventory it redistributes across. If the exchange cannot say how many sites it runs, an outsider cannot judge how much distance the flat port price is actually absorbing.

The association sets the rule, the company carries the bill

The ownership sentence on the About Us page is short and load-bearing: “InterLAN-IX is a private company with Romanian capital entirely owned by the Interlan Association, a non-profit organization of Romanian Internet access service providers.” The same page records that the exchange has been a full rights member of Euro-IX since 2008 and of RIPE NCC since 2015, and the session dates the association itself to 2005: “the InterLAN association was founded in 2005 in Bucharest with around 20 members and later in 2008, we joined EURO-IX association.” The directory entry for Interlan Internet Exchange SRL Only for Strategic Circle records the operating company and its registered autonomous system, AS58022.

Put those facts next to the pricing rule and a structure appears. The people who decide that distance is not priced are the members of a non-profit association; the entity that sells the ports and carries the redundant transport is a company wholly owned by that association. The equality policy is therefore set by the same constituency that benefits from it, and the residual cost of the policy lands on an entity those members own.

That is not a conflict of interest in any sinister sense — it is the ordinary logic of a member-owned exchange — but it does mean the price is a governance decision, reviewed by the people who make it, with no external shareholder to argue for a different balance.

The session account goes further and describes a two-tier market: association membership for local and small operators, commercial agreements for larger networks. No membership terms, eligibility rule or contract was published with the talk, so the split is reported rather than documented. If that description holds, the flat price is doing double duty. It is an access rule for members who own the exchange, and a commercial offer for networks that buy ports without a vote. Both pay the same number; only one of them gets a say in what the number is.

What a buyer can check, and what nobody can

A network weighing a port at a distant point of presence can establish a few things. It can confirm that the same conditions are advertised everywhere, because the operator says so in public and repeats it under questioning. It can confirm the interface range, from 1 Gbps over copper and fibre up to 100 Gbps. It can confirm that the fabric spans Romanian cities plus Frankfurt and Sofia, and that the operator treats inter-PoP redundancy as a requirement rather than an option.

It cannot confirm the number itself, because no tariff is published. It cannot confirm the durability of the rule, because no document states what the transport bill is, how large it has grown, or what would make the exchange revisit a price that ignores distance. Those are the questions that decide whether the equality survives the next site, the next capacity crunch or the next change in wholesale fibre prices in Romania.

The test is concrete. If a surcharge ever appears at a distant point of presence, if a site is quietly withdrawn, or if the About Us page stops advertising sites beyond Romania while the flat price stays in place, the policy has changed and the announcement will not necessarily say so. Until one of those happens, the honest reading is the one the operator gave at RIPE 93: the price is equal everywhere on purpose, and the cost of that equality is carried somewhere the price list does not reach.

Sources