Deepak Jain wrote: But that structure doesn't vary vastly if you'd traffic out that gig via transit vs direct connect. It does vary (and add lots of infrastructure) if you don't aggregate your traffic at IXes and instead use loops to bring transit to you instead of going to it. (say a few 100Mb/s or OC3s in a few places instead of a GigE at an IX).
Indeed.
Perhaps we should (for technical reasons) describe peering as "direct connecting".
This makes a lot of sense to me (although I would suggest a different name later). Since the beginning I have been trying to make the point that "direct connecting" was typically a no-brainer in terms of money. Peering when you have to buy the local loop is not such a slam dunk.
Business reasons aside, technically the difference is that with transit you are expecting access via indirect connections to networks.
I'm not so sure about this. There are lots of people that buy transit and are directly connected to their provider in an IX for example.
With peering you expect direct connections into a network.
If "direct connecting" != peering then definitely. Maybe we need to say differentiate between: - Connected transit - Remote transit - Connected peering - Remote peering And agree that, by default, transit ~= remote transit peering ~= direct peering Michel.