As with all things, this isn't so cut and dried as everyone makes it seem. The OP was asking for an easy answer to a complex question, which usually shows a lack of understanding of the issues, or is an attempt to provoke controversy. So far, most of the discussion has focused on peering as a substitute for transit. The idea behind peering is not that the peer takes your traffic destined for other networks, but that you each deliver the traffic destined for each other directly, without the need to transit. This should save BOTH of you $ on transit, reduce routing complexity for the peered networks, make troubleshooting traffic issues between the networks easier, and improve user experience. Common examples of where peering makes a lot of sense are: Major hosting providers to major national end-user networks. CDNs to end-user networks. Local data centers and DR facilities to metropolitan Ethernet providers. Hosting facilities to networks that service certain specific user communities, such as local realty MLS systems to the local cable and DSL providers. If you're using peering for transit, you're kind of missing the point, and introducing a lot of potential network (route leakage or excessive route prepends) and business (at what point does a transit imbalance become unfair) problems. IMO, peer for direct delivery, use transit for all else. YMMV
-----Original Message----- From: vijay gill [mailto:vgill@vijaygill.com] Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 7:20 PM To: Paul Stewart Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Peering - Benefits?
This is probably going to be a somewhat unpopular opinion, mostly because people cannot figure out their COGS. If you can get transit for cheaper than your COGS, you are better off buying transit and not peering. There are some small arguments to be made for latency and 'cheap/free' peering if you are already buying transit at an exchange and your port/xconn fee is cheaper than your capital/opex for the amount of traffic you peer off.
To be completely realistic, at current transit pricing, you are almost always better off just buying transit from two upstreams and calling it done, especially if you are posting to nanog asking about peering.
/vijay
On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Paul Stewart <pstewart@nexicomgroup.net> wrote:
Hi there...
I'm in a meeting next week to discuss settlement-free peering etc..... always an interesting time. A push is on (by myself) to get into other physical locations and participate on the peering exchanges.
Besides costs, what other factors are benefits to peering?
I can think of some but looking to develop a concrete list of appealing reasons etc. such as:
-control over routing between networks -security aspect (being able to filter/verify routes to some degree) -latency/performance
Just looking for other positive ideas etc...;)
Cheers!
Paul
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