Benefits of Peering

This is the final article in our “reasons to peer” series, and it is dedicated to the non-technical benefit of peering – how it can be used as a quality seal to grow your business.

Assurance of a well-operated network

Peering at an Internet Exchange means being part of an interconnection ecosystem. While the exchange itself is a small niche topic for those who operate it, the ecosystem around it offers a very broad range of possibilities for doing business – another reason to peer.

When it comes to end-user experience, peering has a lot of advantages compared to IP transit-only designs. Better latency, less packet loss, and higher throughput all mean that your services work better and your users will be happy.

We have already talked about latency in a previous article in this “reason to peer” series, when we said even a 2-second delay in the loading time of a website is sufficient to increase the bounce rate more than 100%. 

As we have learned in this reasons to peer series, peering has many advantages, ranging from financial benefits to having a more robust and stable network. It can also offer opportunities for new partnerships.

While buying IP transit is always just a best-effort method, without any guarantee that data is delivered or that the delivery meets any quality of service, peering increases the stability of your network. Read on to learn how this happens in this sixth instalment of our “reasons to peer” series.

The most densely peered networks in the world know that peering is key to having good network performance. In this fifth article in our “reasons to peer” series, we show you how you can improve your connection with major networks at an Internet Exchange.

In this third article in our “reasons to peer” series, we look at how peering lowers latency.

The shorter the trip, the better the latency

Latency is the delay between a user’s action and the response to that action from a website or an application – in networking terms the total time it takes for a data packet to make a round-trip. It is measured in milliseconds, and Internet quality depends on it. For example, for a website, even a 2-second delay in the loading time is sufficient to increase the bounce rate more than 100%!

Peering is a process by which two Internet networks connect and exchange traffic to distribute traffic to each other’s customers without having to pay a third party to carry that traffic across the Internet for them. The routing protocol that allows peering between ISPs is Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is free and benefits all ISPs.

Below are top five ways to get the maximum benefits of Peering.