Peering point speed publicly available?

Sat Jul 3 01:31:16 UTC 2004

On or about July 1 2004, Erik <allegedly at> myevilempire.net> Amundson 
allegedly asked about peering point bandwidth.

Some North American ISPs will tell you that under non-disclosure,
but almost all of them will point you to their standards for peering,
and you won't find many Tier 1 ISPs that peer at less than DS3 in the US,
and probably not many in Canada, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, or Singapore either.
That means the insertion delay is under 0.27ms, or about 27 fiber-miles,
so it's less important than whether the peering is in San Francisco or San Jose.
Queuing due to overload is really much more important than absolute size.
Also, if you're dealing with ISPs that use public peering points,
those may be a performance concern, but in the US that's mostly not Tier1-Tier1.
(Linx is a different case entirely, assuming you want your traffic to be in London.)

Smaller ISPs might be more talkative, or if you're having actual problems,
like why your connection from minneapolis.example1.net to stpaul.example2.net 
goes through a peering point in San Francisco instead of peering in Minnesota
or at most Chicago, big ISPs can also be pretty talkative.  