simonl@rd.bbc.co.uk (Simon Lockhart) writes:
But, given that peering costs are more than just the circuit cost (once you include Exchange Point costs, and colo, etc), why would anyone do this when you can just buy transit for $100/Mbps or less?
Because peering is better. There's no way to become DDoS attack-resistant if you buy transit, since no matter how strong you are, your provider will ultimately be weaker. Whether that's because high splay is required to be strong, or because your provider's security team isn't on a two-minute call back, or because your provider has a larger set of things to invest their capital in than your particular path out, doesn't matter. The fact is, no cost-effective transit will ever be as good as the best high-splay peering.
I'm going through this at work at the moment, and am having problems justifying staying at the West Coast, having only just justified the East Coast, so going to AP (although it's what I'd want to do), is just way out of the question...
OPN (other people's networks) are the second most frequent root cause of connectivity failure. (Network engineers are the most frequent cause, per Vijay's excellent talk in Eugene.) The most reliable access you can get is when you connect to other networks directly rather than using intermediaries. Naturally, with a high number of other networks and of places to meet them, it's only cost effective to peer globally if you have "enough" traffic and if that traffic's reliability bears directly on your top-line revenue. -- Paul Vixie