DrPeering -

Peering is now our strategy... How much traffic can a content heavy network realistically peer away?

Cheryl Will

AS XXXXX

Cheryl -

Thanks for the question.

Diagnosis: Peering success will depend on a variety of factors such as:

1. 1)traffic profile f(volume, dest, type, growth, IX presences, etc),
   

2. 2)peering coordinator skill and approach,
   

3. 3)timing and peering inclination trends in the target peer community, etc.
   

but the window of peering opportunity in the U.S. has been closing a bit.

I used to tell folks that they could expect maybe 40% of their traffic to be easily peerable, and the remainder gets exponentially more difficult to peer away. Recent discussions with large scale peering folks however reveal that it is harder to peer away that first  40% than it used to be.  They point to the rising peering requirements of the access networks, and perhaps their predilection toward paid peering instead of free peering. They point to the Arbor Report which shows fewer sources and sinks are responsible for a larger and larger chunks of traffic. For whatever reason, peering with the access networks is harder and probably more important. Given that you are content heavy, it may be more difficult than it used to be to get to 40% free peering.

I would estimate peering par today to be closer to 25% - expect that a good peering coordinator should be able to easily peer away about 25% of your traffic at a couple IXes.

Prescription: I would advise that, if you need peering for performance or marketing strategy reasons, you should get in now before it gets harder. Peering tends to stay in place even as peering policies change. There will be some companies that de-peer because they adopted more stringent policies over time, but this is not the norm. Historically, legacy peering tends to stick around.  Because of this stickiness, back in the boom years, companies were even valued (in part) on what peering they had!  Some ISPs even purchased companies with the expectation that the Tier 1 peering sessions would survive the acquisition.

So,

1. 1)there is value in peering,
   

2. 2)the window of opportunity is closing,
   

3. 3)peering sessions tend to stick around even as policies for new peer changes.
   

If peering is a strategic intent, you should get in now.

Comments: The other thing I can suggest to you is to send in your top 50 target peers. We have seen remarkable similarity in peering profiles across companies in the same sector. We can predict who will peer, who will not, how to approach, etc. from the list and provide you with some feedback/suggestions. This is often done to help new ISPs select the best Internet Exchanges for their profile. We have done hundreds of peering introductions over the years and would be glad to help you with this.

Always track the price of transit as well - you might find over time that your split of traffic rationally changes over time. Lots of tools like paid peering and inexpensive high quality CDNs are available now and should be in your tool bag.

Hope this helps -

Dr Peering

DrPeering@DrPeering.net