Buying IP Bandwidth Across a Peering Exchange

Wed Nov 26 04:45:46 UTC 2014

Be careful joining an IX just to peer with Google (AS15169) and a few others...especially if your exchange doesn’t have route servers established.

Some companies, such as NetFlix, have a truly open peering policy; establishing a bilateral BGP session with them is super-straightforward.

On the other hand, Google’s actively-enforced policy requires you already exchange 100Mbps+ w/ their netblocks: upon requesting a session they’ll monitor/check related traffic for a few weeks before following up on your initial request.

More details: https://peering.google.com/about/peering_policy.html

As for transit across IX fabric, I know that HE.net is at least willing to discuss such a possibility (just started this exact discussion with their NOC last night), although they discourage it for reasons pointed out by others in this thread. On the other hand, with a willing transit provider, if you prepend your AS a few times…an IX's fabric makes a very cost-effective failover.

Gregg Berkholtz

> On Nov 25, 2014, at 10:47 AM, Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I know typically peering exchanges are made for peering traffic between
> providers, but can you buy IP transit from a provider on an exchange? An
> example, buy a 10G port on an exchange, peer 5Gbps of traffic with multiple
> providers on the exchange, and buy 5Gbps of IP transit from others on the
> exchange?
> 
> Some might ask why not get a cross connect to the provider. It is cheaper
> to buy an port on the exchange (which includes the cross connect to the
> exchange) than buy multiple cross connects. Plus we are planning on getting
> a wave to the exchange, and not having any physical routers or switches at
> the datacenter where the exchange/wave terminates at. Is this possible?