The type of customer on the network is important here.
Most traffic on residential eyeball networks goes to IXes. I know guys pushing 85% of their traffic to IXes. Even small IXes like ours are capturing well over 50% of an ISP's traffic. Netflix, Google, Akamai, Cloudflare. That's what, 2/3rds of the traffic an eyeball has?
Now if you're not predominately serving residential customers, then I agree and briefly stated so before.
Flow monitoring is indeed important.
Usually, DIA (as transit delivered to a customer) is more expensive than transport + transit + small colo (1U\2U stuff) + IX... at least as observed by many of my brethren.
That's before you get to the fact that a lot of transit is sub-optimal. Most ISPs we've hooked to our IXes have seen an immediate increase in network utilization because upstream congestion and whatever latency is gone.
From: "Matt Erculiani" <merculiani@gmail.com>
To: "Mike Hammett" <nanog@ics-il.net>
Cc: "Mehmet Akcin" <mehmet@akcin.net>, "nanog@nanog.org list" <nanog@nanog.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2018 9:49:21 AM
Subject: Re: How to choose a transit provider?
I would actually venture to say the contrary. An IX should be the last item on your list since it only really makes sense at a certain scale and if you can make use of the providers on it.
Most of the networks you'll have trouble getting to via transit providers are that way because of how they do business, which also means hardly any of them peer at IXes. I'd say a network should have a least 3 good transits before considering an IX. Even then it's not so black and white. If after your first transit provider is installed and you set up your flow monitoring, you notice most of your traiffic is going to/coming from ASNs that peer on your local exchanges, then it absolutely makes sense to open a connection right then.
IX links aren't a whole lot cheaper than transit (sometimes they cost more depending on how hard it is to get to them) and many networks will benefit from a more diverse blend of transits than IX peering regardless of what they're doing. IXes are extremely important to the internet at large, but they're not for everyone.
-Matt