Anyone got numbers on peering vs transit?

Fri May 5 08:04:22 UTC 2006

On Fri, May 05, 2006 at 10:11:31AM +0300, Aleksi Suhonen wrote:
> 
> I forgot to stress that I'm particularly interested in the ratio
> between private and public peering.

The answer is, it depends. In any given region, prevailing market 
conditions (the price of transit, etc), the costs of ix ports, the costs 
of colo and fiber xconns, the geographic distribution of peers, and the 
attitudes towards public and private peering are all going to have a huge 
impact.

For example, public peering in Europe is FAR more pervasive than it is in 
the US. Obvious reasons for this include:

European IX's                           US IX's
* Largely run by non-profits            * Largely run by for-profits
* Largely un-associated with colos      * Largely run by colo operators
* Early adopters of new tech like 10GE  * Significantly lagging on new tech
* IX ports are generally very cheap     * Same ports usually cost 3-8x more
* Larger numbers of smaller peers       * Smaller numbers of larger peers
* Lots of language specific content     * Lots of globally targetted content

Obviously market economics drive public peering much more in Europe than 
in the US. To put it into perspective, the amount of traffic exchange by a 
single "large" IX (such as AMS-IX) is roughly equal to all of the IX's in 
the US combined. That same amount of traffic is roughly 1/2 (or less) of 
the the traffic exchanged by a single "large" network (such as Cogent, 
Level3, AT&T, ATDN, etc) via private peering.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
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