ISP Peering - does it matter?

Tom_ed1987 · 1 Oct 2020 at 14:29

As per the above really - do some do it better than others?

I've always got really low pings on anything provided by Openreach from my house to servers in London. Comparatively, on virgin media from roughly the same location pings are around 4x worse.

I tried looking up various ISP's on peeringdb & there are apparently dramatic differences, but maybe it's not a complete picture:

Talktalk: https://www.peeringdb.com/net/721
Virgin: https://www.peeringdb.com/net/1412 ; https://www.peeringdb.com/net/346

Does anyone reading know much about it? Just interested in the subject really

- I don't see it discussed much but with home 1gbps connections becoming more common it must be increasingly important.

Caged · 1 Oct 2020 at 14:33

You're conflating different things, the higher latency on VM isn't related to their peering agreements. There will also be private peering that won't show in a database.

I don't find peering to be an issue if an ISP is of a large enough size - most of them have on-net Akamai instances so your software updates and Netflix are all served from within your provider network, and then direct peering to Microsoft, Google and Amazon to keep cloud services nice and fast.

I have seen peering come up when talking about leased lines, there are lots of smaller providers that try and compete on price, and seem to send everything out of their network via Cogent, and the performance is often pretty bad.

Illusion · 2 Oct 2020 at 19:29

The big networks are unlikely to be lacking with peering, there are absolutely smaller ISPs selling 1Gbit synchronous packages on networks that must be heavily over subscribed and built on cheap hardware though, so I would question their upstream peering arrangements (or just avoid taking a service from them completely)

Felon · 4 Oct 2020 at 09:34

Most game studios will generally have data from where most of their player base is connecting from. If they own their own peering infrastructure, they're normally the ones who reach out to specific ISPs to setup peering with them - in order to improve player experience and stuff.

We often find clusters of players stuck on smaller ISPs in various places, and pro-actively reach out to them to peer, sometimes they want to do it for free - sometimes they like to charge insane amounts of money for access to eyeballs, so sometimes ISPs themselves can make it very hard (this tends to be the case in places like LATAM, rather than EU/NA etc)