About the Author
William B. Norton is the Executive Director for DrPeering.net, a leading Internet Peering consultancy. He is an internationally recognized expert on Internet Peering and Internet Exchange Points, a strategy consultant, and a highly sought-after public speaker.
From 1998 through 2008, Bill held the position of Co-Founder and Chief Technical Liaison for Equinix, Inc., a large-scale global provider of peering and colocation services. In this role he spent 90% of his time working directly with the Internet operations community facilitating interconnections, researching, and documenting the industry’s best current practices. The resulting “peering white papers” and the follow-on DrPeering.net website are the most widely cited sources for information on Internet Peering in the industry.
In this capacity, Bill led seventeen North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) Peering Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions. These came to be a popular fixture at NANOG meetings. He established himself as a thought leader in the peering community by authoring the business models for how companies could use peering relationships to dramatically reduce their network costs. His methodology described in the Business Case for Peering is now used by virtually every company that engages in large-scale traffic engineering. When Bill left Equinix in 2008, it had a market cap of $3.6B.
Prior to Equinix, Bill was the Internet Engineering Manager responsible for, among other things, chairing NANOG, the operations forum for the North American Internet from 1995 through 1998.
Bill received his MBA from the Michigan Business School and his Computer Science degree from Potsdam College.