Today, I was approached by *unnamed-ethernet-extension-company*. They extend ethernets between several US and UK peering exchanges.
While speaking with them today, thier engineer and I got into a
of a disagreement as to why people peer with each other at
little bit public exchange
points. My belief is that generally speaking, networks meet at public exchange points (such as MAE-*, LINX, AMSIX, AADS, etc) is to exchange traffic with each other more economically (read: save money).
His belief is that people will pay a premium to get to an exchange point, because it's worth paying a premium to have 'less hops' between two networks.
The problem with this idea is that public exchange points need to be *avoided* when they get too congested. People may start out trying to minimize number of hops, but I think they eventually try to minimize total latency.
Hmm. Congested public exchange points were a reality at some point in the past. They are now a recurrent myth, thanks to the demise of FDDI EPs and the rise of GigE EPs. There is little congestion, at this point. Of course, this could be because most Internet traffic is exchanged over private peering. I think that most clued folks are largely uninterested in hop-count. Latency is much more important. - Daniel Golding
Essentially, he said that paying more for peering that for transit is typical, and to be expected, and most people accept this.
Whats the common opinion on this?