Question about peering

Sat Apr 7 22:16:30 UTC 2012

Actually, Suresh, I disagree.  It depends on the
facility/country/continent, the cost of joining the local IX fabric at
a reasonable bandwidth, your cost model, and your transit costs.  In
short, it's not 1999 anymore, and peering is not automatically the
right answer from a purely fiscal perspective (though it may be from a
technical perspective; see below).

At certain IXes that have a perfect storm of high priced ports and a
good assortment of carriers with sufficiently high quality service and
aggressive pricing, a good negotiator can fairly easily find himself
in a position where the actual cost per megabit of traffic moved on
peered bandwidth exceeds the cost of traffic moved on transit _by an
order of magnitude_.  That's without even factoring in the (low)
maintenance cost of having a bunch of BGP sessions around or upgraded
routers or whatever.

Sometimes making the AS path as short as possible makes a lot of sense
(e.g. when trying to get an anycast network to do the right thing),
but assumptions that peering results in lower costs are less true
every day.

-r

Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists at gmail.com> writes:

> what does it cost you to peer, versus what does it cost you to not peer?
>
> if you are at the same ix the costs of peering are very low indeed
>
> On Saturday, April 7, 2012, Anurag Bhatia wrote:
>
>> Hello everyone
>>
>>
>>
>> I am curious to know how small ISPs plan peering with other interested
>> parties. E.g if ISP A is connected to ISP C via big backbone ISP B, and say
>> A and C both have open peering policy and assuming the exist in same
>> exchange or nearby. Now at this point is there is any "minimum bandwidth"
>> considerations? Say if A and C have 1Gbps + of flowing traffic - very
>> likely peering would be good idea to save transit costs to B. But if A and
>> C have very low levels - does it still makes sense? Does peering costs
>> anything if ISPs are in same exchange? Does at low traffic level it makes
>> more sense to keep on reaching other ISPs via big transit provider?
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> --
>>
>> Anurag Bhatia
>> anuragbhatia.com
>> or simply - http://[2001:470:26:78f::5] if you are on IPv6 connected
>> network!
>>
>> Twitter: @anurag_bhatia <https://twitter.com/#!/anurag_bhatia>
>> Linkedin: http://linkedin.anuragbhatia.com
>>
>
>
> -- 
> Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists at gmail.com)