I am looking for any guidance and advice people have regarding first time peerings in South America. Currently I am doing some work with a content provider in North America and I want to get them better routers into South America, to South American ISPs. I am looking to get them an interconnect from their NA location to SA, into a PTT IX location in Sao Paulo (they seem to be up there for top IXs in SA, or am I mistaken?).
First a clarification: PTT stands for "traffic exchange point" in Portuguese, so people familiar with this acronym related to telco companies or mobile/ http://ptt.br will only give you routes to Brazil, so you would still need other locations to reach other south american countries. If the content provider is already at Miami NOTA (Nap of The Americas), it's already at one of the best locations to be to reach all South America, but with if a latency penalty.
I'm new to the PTT IXs so does anyone have any recommendations about any aspect here, support horror stories, reason to prefer one location for peering over another etc? I see Level3 are in the PTT Sao Paulo location, and we have access to Level 3 already. Is there someone else I should be looking at who is especially good at private routes down to SA, enough to digress from Level 3, or are Level 3 a good choice here? Again, any past experiences are welcome, and recommendations for a different IX or provider any why.
PTT.br is a Layer-2 traffic exchange with route-servers, so you need either to colo a router here and back-haul your traffic (preferred solution) or to contract a lan-2-lan over MPLS circuit from a provider. Level 3 is probably your best bet, but one other option could be the BrT/Oi facility where Globenet (http://globenet.net/) has its Sao Paulo POP. You would probably prefer to deal with Globenet and have them hire colo and cross-connect from their sister company (Globenet is part of the Oi group). The only fiber cables with available capacity to get to South America are the ones from Level 3, Globenet and Telefónica, but Telefónica International is not a PTT.br location (although being a member and provide transit services) and Telefónica Brazil is so not helpful for such services. LANautilus has some capacity swap with Level 3 as well. In short: if you will be installing a router here but not servers, Level 3 (#1) or Globenet (#2). If you are not installing anything, Telefónica and LANautilus are also choices. If you would be sending a CDN node with servers and will only need Internet uplink, then you have more choices, but that's not my reading of your strategy, am I right ? Disclaimer: I work for the organization who maintains PTT.br. Rubens