there is also the increasingly common pattern of "remote peering" where you lease a circuit to an exchange point but do not establish a presence in the facility. this can either be done with the last leg on a dedicated cross-connect (so it looks to the exchange operator just like any other connection except that it is to an intermediary and not to you) or multiplexed on a single connection to the exchange operated by a carrier that specialises in facilitating remote peering. to the extent that this practice dramatically decouples the peering graph from the underlying infrastructure graph it is debatable if this is a wise or efficient strategy. on the other hand it significantly widens the operational scope of bgp configuration knobs. but the point is, you can do peering without a physical presence in a location, and it is a common thing to do. cheers, -w -- William Waites <wwaites@tardis.ed.ac.uk> | School of Informatics https://tardis.ed.ac.uk/~wwaites/ | University of Edinburgh https://hubs.net.uk/ | HUBS AS60241 The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.