With these US street prices in mind, how can anyone justify paying prices of some commercial exchanges (the last offer I got from PAIX Palo Alto was USD 5500 per month for a FE port about a year ago, and Equinix Ashburn was not much cheaper). Please note: I'm not talking of the technical advantages of peering.
Or, perhaps the better question is. How can one justify the cost of _public_ peering when fiber cross-connects are $200-$300/month each. That is at least 20-40 fiber direct connects [twice that if you & your peers split the cost of cross-connects]. If you only need 1Gb/s of cross-connect capacity you can take a 3x50 switch [or use it as a router] and terminate all of the peering sessions on it or via VLAN-trunking directly on your real router [C/J/what have you]. Your hardware cost is marginally increased and your capacity is MANY times larger. I don't think there are too many exchanges anymore that have 80+ active peers. If you do participate in such an exchange, have 80 peers on it, and don't exceed a single port's speed, shame on you. :) DJ