Why don't ISPs peer with everyone?

Scott Helms khelms at ispalliance.net
Mon Jun 6 22:55:24 UTC 2011


I'll answer with some questions:

Where should they peer?

Who should/will pay for the routers and aggregation ports?  How about 
the power, racks, and building space?

Who should/will pay for the network engineers to do the configuration 
for the peering?

In short, peering isn't free for anyone.  It _can_ be efficient in some 
cases but in others its damn pita and you never really know which one a 
given case will turn into.  (its not always a problem of technical 
competence)

On 6/6/2011 6:19 PM, rucasbrown at hushmail.com wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I wouldn't consider myself a network engineer, nor do I have any
> formal training, but why don't ISPs peer with every other ISP? It
> would only save EVERYONE money if they did this, no? Only issue I
> see is with possibly hijacked / malicious AS owners, but that's not
> very common to do without being caught.
>
> All the whole "don't peer with this guy" only makes your customers
> have worse latencies and paths to other people, making the Internet
> less healthy.
>
> Thanks,
> Rucas
>
> PS: sorry if I sent this twice; client lagged a bit.
>
>
>


-- 
Scott Helms
Vice President of Technology
ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum
(678) 507-5000
--------------------------------
http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
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