Evolution of the U.S. Peering Ecosystem
NANOG 31
Evolution of the U.S. Peering Ecosystem
Bill Norton, Equinix
May 25, 2004
A new Internet peering ecosystem is rising from the ashes of the 1999/2000 U.S. telecommunications sector crash. Global Internet transit providers have gone bust and a critical broadband infrastructure provider has failed, leaving in its wake a large set of Internet players to fend for themselves to provide their customers with Internet services. A broad set of service providers that were once focused only on growing their market share (at any cost) now are bending down to shave pennies off of their cost structure. Those who cannot prove the viability of their business model while satisfying their customer demands are out of business. In this presentation, we share research carried out over the last four years with hundreds of Peering Coordinators to document the recent chaotic evolution of the peering ecosystem. We do this by first defining the notion of an \"Internet Peering Ecosystem\" as a set of autonomous Internet Regions, each with three distinct categories of participants. Each of these groups of participants has their own sets of characteristics, motivations and corresponding behaviors and interconnection dynamics. We describe four classes of Peering Inclinations as articulated in Peering Policies. The bulk of the presentation, however, focuses on the evolution of the U.S. Peering Ecosystem. Several key players, some abandoned by their service providers, have entered into the Peering Ecosystem and caused a significant disruption to the ecosystem. Peer-to-peer application traffic has grown to represent a significant portion of their expense. We describe five major events and three emerging evolutions in the Peering Ecosystem that have had, and continue to have, a significant disintermediation effect on Tier 1 ISPs.