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@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!
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-- Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists@gmail.com)