On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Owen DeLong <owend@he.net> wrote:

For MICE to be viable as an exchange long term, connections to MICE need to cover upgrades like this as well as maintenance, etc.

Agreed

It's great that people are willing to donate hardware/money, but, I would like to see MICE develop a longer-term view of its own financial support where all members pay a fair share and we should be building up a reserve that can initially purchase any needed hardware that MICE doesn't own and later can provide for unforseen events.

I have proposed to a number of members charging monthly or annually for 10G connections. The idea being that if you really need XE you're getting quite a bit of value from the exchange.

I posted a poll on the linked in page and was rather taken back that ~30% felt there was no $ value in 10G ports. On the flip side, 70% thought a MICE 10G port was worth at least $150/month.

The last part of your statement is also very important. Being able to address things for we have failed to plan without affecting the service the exchange provides is critical to our ongoing usefulness.

My back of the napkin, assuming we're paying for everything, puts us at an annual recurring need of about 15k. This doesn't include purchase of the initial switch and initial end-user ARIN address fees.