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Hi Josh! Do you buy any transit at all or rely solely on peering? Who do you peer with, and how easy has it been to find peers, due to the huge asymmetry in t

Hi Josh! Do you buy any transit at all or rely solely on peering? Who do you peer with, and how easy has it been to find peers, due to the huge asymmetry in traffic? Do you have any CDN caches deployed (GGC, Netflix, etc.)?

toast0 8y ago
I'm not related, but any small ISP is going to need transit. Larger ISPs have pretty high requirements to peer, but random sites will be single homed in those networks; to say nothing of overseas sites. But, most of the networks that provide the majority of the traffic have pretty open peering policies, and the LA area has a lot of places to peer, and peering places are also usually a reasonable place to get transit so... If you're seeing at least a few gbps from FAANG, they'll peer with you, if you're where they are, and all of them have PoPs in LA, because everyone is there (this is a little circular, LA was highly connected in the PTSN because of population size, and that lead to early internet exchanges and undersea cabling, which leads to more people wanting to be there and so on) I'd imagine if they have the traffic to justify it, and the space to house it, they'd get the CDN caches. It's a pretty good win, peering is settlement free, but access to the peering point isn't free; keeping traffic from using your ingress capacity is nice (depending on your network architecture anyway)
fixthenet 8y ago
Great tech questions. Right now, in our beta/test network, we're receiving DIA service to a remote server location and that's it. No peering, no CDNs. Our next steps are to increase the bandwidth of our DIA, since that's more cost effective at our current scale than we'd benefit by peering. The step after that is to swap that DIA for transport and then colocate in DTLA to find peers. CDN caches often require a minimum number of customers on network, something like 5000 for Netflix, if I recall, so we'll have to grow before we can take advantage of caching.
- amazon_not 8y ago
  A Netflix cache appliance isn't dependent on the number of customers, it's on dependent on the amount of traffic from Netflix. You don't need 5000 Netflix customers, you need 5 Gbps of peak traffic to qualify. However that isn't your only option. You can just peer with Netflix, they have an open peering policy.
  - ucaetano 8y ago
    The issue with peering with Netflix is that Netflix only peers in certain locations, so you need to buy transport to the exchange where Netflix is present.

toast0 8y ago

I'm not related, but any small ISP is going to need transit. Larger ISPs have pretty high requirements to peer, but random sites will be single homed in those networks; to say nothing of overseas sites. But, most of the networks that provide the majority of the traffic have pretty open peering policies, and the LA area has a lot of places to peer, and peering places are also usually a reasonable place to get transit so... If you're seeing at least a few gbps from FAANG, they'll peer with you, if you're where they are, and all of them have PoPs in LA, because everyone is there (this is a little circular, LA was highly connected in the PTSN because of population size, and that lead to early internet exchanges and undersea cabling, which leads to more people wanting to be there and so on) I'd imagine if they have the traffic to justify it, and the space to house it, they'd get the CDN caches. It's a pretty good win, peering is settlement free, but access to the peering point isn't free; keeping traffic from using your ingress capacity is nice (depending on your network architecture anyway)

fixthenet 8y ago

Great tech questions. Right now, in our beta/test network, we're receiving DIA service to a remote server location and that's it. No peering, no CDNs. Our next steps are to increase the bandwidth of our DIA, since that's more cost effective at our current scale than we'd benefit by peering. The step after that is to swap that DIA for transport and then colocate in DTLA to find peers. CDN caches often require a minimum number of customers on network, something like 5000 for Netflix, if I recall, so we'll have to grow before we can take advantage of caching.

amazon_not 8y ago
A Netflix cache appliance isn't dependent on the number of customers, it's on dependent on the amount of traffic from Netflix. You don't need 5000 Netflix customers, you need 5 Gbps of peak traffic to qualify. However that isn't your only option. You can just peer with Netflix, they have an open peering policy.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  The issue with peering with Netflix is that Netflix only peers in certain locations, so you need to buy transport to the exchange where Netflix is present.