Actually, Suresh, I disagree. It depends on the facility/country/continent, the cost of joining the local IX fabric at a reasonable bandwidth, your cost model, and your transit costs. In short, it's not 1999 anymore, and peering is not automatically the right answer from a purely fiscal perspective (though it may be from a technical perspective; see below).
At certain IXes that have a perfect storm of high priced ports and a good assortment of carriers with sufficiently high quality service and aggressive pricing, a good negotiator can fairly easily find himself in a position where the actual cost per megabit of traffic moved on peered bandwidth exceeds the cost of traffic moved on transit _by an order of magnitude_. That's without even factoring in the (low) maintenance cost of having a bunch of BGP sessions around or upgraded routers or whatever. Sometimes making the AS path as short as possible makes a lot of sense (e.g. when trying to get an anycast network to do the right thing), but assumptions that peering results in lower costs are less true every day. -r Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.li...@gmail.com> writes: > what does it cost you to peer, versus what does it cost you to not peer? > > if you are at the same ix the costs of peering are very low indeed > > On Saturday, April 7, 2012, Anurag Bhatia wrote: > >> Hello everyone >> >> >> >> I am curious to know how small ISPs plan peering with other interested >> parties. E.g if ISP A is connected to ISP C via big backbone ISP B, and say >> A and C both have open peering policy and assuming the exist in same >> exchange or nearby. Now at this point is there is any "minimum bandwidth" >> considerations? Say if A and C have 1Gbps + of flowing traffic - very >> likely peering would be good idea to save transit costs to B. But if A and >> C have very low levels - does it still makes sense? Does peering costs >> anything if ISPs are in same exchange? Does at low traffic level it makes >> more sense to keep on reaching other ISPs via big transit provider? >> >> >> >> Thanks. >> >> -- >> >> Anurag Bhatia >> anuragbhatia.com >> or simply - http://[2001:470:26:78f::5] if you are on IPv6 connected >> network! >> >> Twitter: @anurag_bhatia <https://twitter.com/#!/anurag_bhatia> >> Linkedin: http://linkedin.anuragbhatia.com >> > > > -- > Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.li...@gmail.com)
