 pstewartPremium,VIP
join:2005-10-12
Peterborough, ON
kudos:1 | mbourd25...
That's a complicated question but here's what I can tell you from experience. Simply, the more peering an ISP has the better.
There's exceptions in the sense that an ISP can be sending traffic across a peering exchange such as Torix or Ottix but their return traffic is coming in from the Internet itself. When that happens, there's not really much benefit and unfortunately this happens sometimes and isn't always within the ISP's control itself. When the peering is bi-directional, it basically eliminates almost all latency because you're pretty much "directly connected" to the other provider.
It varies from ISP to ISP, but typically only about 5-10% of an ISP's traffic goes across peering exchanges that they are directly connected to.
Some ISP's don't advertise their peering and bandwidth... and it's no big secret in my opinion. The funniest things I see is providers who advertise "connected via multiple OC-12 fiber connections" etc. etc..... there are *some* providers where that would be considered true, but a majority may have a physical OC-12 connection (622Mb/s over ATM typically) but only be using 100Mb/s of that connection. It's a lot of marketing to be honest.... the IP engineers behind the scenes know the truth about their networks, but they are not the people who you generally talk to and they sure as heck don't do the marketing..hehee....
Hope this helps...
Paul |
