10 Reasons to peer: 1. Peering Raises Your Revenue

10 Reasons to peer: 1. Peering Raises Your Revenue

 

Peering is a process in which two or more networks exchange traffic, and it can help you to make the most of your resources and expand your network for the benefit of your business.

From reduced cost to improved user experience, peering has many benefits for all sorts of organizations, from small hosting providers to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and content delivery networks, and on to enterprises. In our new article series, we take a look at 10 different reasons why you should give peering a go. In the first installment of our “reasons to peer” series, we explain how peering can help you to make more money by offering a better service to your customers.

Shortest possible path to your target networks

If you are an ISP or a carrier, you provide your customers access to other networks. These customers can, and often do, have more than one provider, which puts you into direct competition in terms of delivering the customers’ traffic. If not steered manually by the customer, there is exactly one reason that decides who delivers the most traffic to the customer: The network who can deliver the shortest path wins the largest amount of traffic.

Peering helps you to shorten the paths to other networks compared to classical IP transit. With transit, it could well be that the customer’s target network sits behind multiple transit carriers, and if your competitor can offer a path with fewer hops, the traffic will go through their network. With peering, you can offer direct or shorter routes to the networks your customers are trying to reach.

More traffic, more revenue

So, to put it simply: By introducing peering and offering direct and shorter routes to networks, you win more traffic from your customers and competitors, which means more revenue for your business.

 

Best ISP Practices: While connecting to an Internet Exchange

Internet Exchange is a physical infrastructure through which Content Aggregators and ISP’s exchange internet traffic. More advancements in IX technology have been seen over the last 10 years.

Normally, the success of an IXP should be measured by its ability to sustainably contribute to the development of the Internet ecosystem within its community. Growth in the number of members connecting to IX encourages to exchange the internet traffic and keep it local.

Members connect to Internet exchanges to peer directly with other ISP & content networks which results in lower reliance on Internet transit, with improved reliability & efficiency. As per Peering DB, there are now more than 600+ public internet exchange points. The main features of IX are to provide route-server peering.

The peering policy of an IXP is normally categorized as Bilateral & Multilateral (Route Server) Peering.

  • The Bilateral Peering policy allows each network operator to choose which other network operators it wants to exchange traffic with. Peering connections must be manually established through coordinated technical action taken by both parties in the peering relationship.
  • Multilateral/Route Server Peering policy allows all the operators connected to the IXP to automatically exchange traffic with each other by making a single connection to a central service called a Route Server. This makes it easy for network operators to establish and manage large numbers of peering relationships at the exchange.

While configuring these peering at IX, many issues have been reported with respect to misconfiguration of routers by new members. Some of the issues reported include unwanted broadcasts, MAC Flooding, ICMP redirects, misconfiguration of Rules & Filters.

ISP’s should be aware of the best practices while connecting to Internet Exchanges.

Download this documents presented at JANOG on “IX Configuration Best practices

DE-CIX India provides Bilateral Peering & Route Server Peering through its world-class infrastructure backed by DE-CIX. This allows 220+ Networks to interconnect with each other.