Initial Peering Negotiation

Internet Service Providers typically have a person or group specifically tasked with peering and traffic engineering issues. For example, UUNet has a “Peering Steering Committee” to evaluate peering requests.  Some variations of the following steps lead to the parties either leaving the negotiation or proceeding to peering methodology discussions.

Interviews have highlighted a key challenge for ISPs. Finding the right person to speak with at the target ISP is a difficult and time intensive process. Peering Coordinators change jobs and there is no standard way to find out who handles this task. Mergers and acquisitions cloud lines of communication. Even if the name is known, Peering Coordinators are often traveling, way behind in e-mail, and prioritizing e-mail based on the subject or the sender. This is where “people networking” helps a great deal, and hiring expertise for their contacts speeds this initial contact process up quite a bit. In some cases, peering is expedited between ISPs simply because the decision makers have a previous relationship. This was the dominant mode of operation in the early days of the Internet.

In any case, peering contacts are initiated in one of the following ways:

a)via electronic mail, using the pseudo standard peering@<ispdomain>.net or a personal contact,

b)from contacts listed on an exchange point participant list,

c)with tech-c or admin-c from DNS or ASN registries,

d)informal meeting in an engineering forum like NANOG, IETF, RIPE, etc.,

e)at trade shows from introductions among speakers, or with booth staff,

f)from the target ISP sales force,

g)from the target ISP NOC,

h)as part of a larger business transaction.

Second, mutual non-disclosures agreements (NDAs) may be negotiated and signed, and a discussion of peering policy and prerequisites follow. Note that NDAs are an optional step, and many ISPs do not require signed NDAs prior to discussions. Traffic engineering discussions and data disclosure may be used to justify the peering relationship. Each ISP typically has a set of requirements for peering that include peering at some number of geographically distributed locations, sometimes at public exchange points.

Traffic volume is usually a key determining factor. The decision rule hinges upon whether or not there is sufficient savings from peering to justify spending capital on a port on a router and/or a portion of the interconnection costs or augmenting existing capacity into an exchange point. A Bilateral Peering Agreement(BLPA) is the legal form that details each parties understanding of acceptable behavior, and defines the arms length interactions that each would agreed to.

Another motivation for peering to factor in includes lower latency and/or more regional distribution of traffic than existing connections allow.

This process is diagrammed below.

Acknowledgements