Who is DrPeering?

Bill's Mom's answer that "Dr. Peering invented 'peering' on the intercom." The truth is not quite as entertaining.

In 2008, William B. Norton "Bill" finished his career at Equinix and attended the Global Peering Forum in the Dominican Republic with a client. The Dominican Republic is a country in the Caribbean sometimes referred to by its initials, "DR." Anyway, at the opening social, Frank Orlowski asked Bill to write some peering related articles for the DE-CIX newsletter, and since Bill always explained things with drawings, graphs and formulas, Frank thought it could be an advice column. Bill thought that 'DR' peering and 'Dr.Peering' was a nice play on words. So, "DR. Peering" was launched. (Bill has an MBA and a computer science degree, but is not a PhD.)

Bill's other interests at the time were to make sure that the most recent versions of his peering white papers remained freely available. While many of these white papers were hosted on-line at universities around the world, they were often the older out-of-date versions. Worse, some unscrupulous firms were providing downloads of these white papers for a fee, or as part of a document library that required a subscription. Bill collected all of the research for the white papers from the Internet operations community, so he has always felt that they should be freely distributed back to the community. So, since the DE-CIX was funding him to write the newsletter, he applied the funds to creating and maintaining the DrPeering.net web site that would hold both the Ask.DrPeering.net blogs and the white papers.

For ease of access he edited these papers into web pages and soon he was getting 600 page views a day. Not bad for a niche topic!.

So after 10 years as Co-Founder and Chief Technical Liaison for Equinix, and a few years chairing NANOG, Bill decided to help the next generation of peering coordinators connect to the core of the Internet by writing the definitive Internet Peering book. All of his time at Equinix was spent facilitating these types of interconnections, building the Internet Peering Ecosystem of the largest ISPs, carriers and content providers in the world. Of course, these parties ended up peering at the Equinix facilities. He wanted to continue this activity but this time, do so by working for the client. He leveraged his understanding of these companies' self-interest, their pain points, and how interconnecting at a colocation center would improve things. Bill's book is available on Amazon.com, and his consulting is mostly centered around his intensive 2-day peering workshop for executive teams. Most recently he has consulted for large multi-national companies with interests in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria.

 

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The 2014 Internet Peering Playbook is now available on the iPad at the Apple Store and for the Amazon Kindle. The Kindle, ePub and PDF form are also perpetually updated on the DrPeering DropBox share.

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