DrPeering

We are a large access network in Asia. Is it possible to forge relationships with content providers so they pay to peer with us? What should be my strategy?

regards

Tan

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Tan - Yes.

At the heart of Paid Peering is the power relationship. Understand your power position.

In every Internet Peering Ecosystem we studied, Access Network customers are typically singly homed. The Access Network (you) connect many “captive” customers, customers who are reachable only through you. The Content Providers that wish to send their content to your customers have no alternative ; to get their content to these eyeballs they have to send it directly (by peering) or indirectly (through transit)  through you. Since peering will be better performance, it is reasonable that some might pay extra for the privilege.

The Content Providers on the other hand are typically multi-homed and provide access to only one customer - themselves !  This is the key aspect to this power asymmetry; they need you more than you need them.

So the content provider question is:

“Is it worth money to get my content closer to the eyeballs? “

If you follow the lead of Comcast and price Paid Peering similar to Internet Transit pricing, you can enable the Content Provider better performance and extract a little revenue in the process. 

There are a few issues to consider of course. Among other things, you will need to develop the internal capabilities to support these paid peers as customers. You will need to develop a Peering Policy that articulates your peering inclination; we have done several peering workshops with companies to do this, bringing their multi-disciplinary Peering Steering Committee up to speed. (You don’t need a workshop to do this by the way - just about all of the material we would use to bring your team up to speed is on the DrPeering.net web site. )

So yes, you do have the ability.

It has always been an interesting debate in the Peering Community about whether access networks should charge content providers to deliver content your customers requested.

Dr Peering

DrPeering@DrPeering.net