The type of customer on the network is important here. Most traffic on residential eyeball networks goes to IXes. I know guys pushing 85% of their traffic to IXes. Even small IXes like ours are capturing well over 50% of an ISP's traffic. Netflix, Google, Akamai, Cloudflare. That's what, 2/3rds of the traffic an eyeball has?
Now if you're not predominately serving residential customers, then I agree and briefly stated so before. Flow monitoring is indeed important. Usually, DIA (as transit delivered to a customer) is more expensive than transport + transit + small colo (1U\2U stuff) + IX... at least as observed by many of my brethren. That's before you get to the fact that a lot of transit is sub-optimal. Most ISPs we've hooked to our IXes have seen an immediate increase in network utilization because upstream congestion and whatever latency is gone. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matt Erculiani" <merculi...@gmail.com> To: "Mike Hammett" <na...@ics-il.net> Cc: "Mehmet Akcin" <meh...@akcin.net>, "nanog@nanog.org list" <nanog@nanog.org> Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2018 9:49:21 AM Subject: Re: How to choose a transit provider? I would actually venture to say the contrary. An IX should be the last item on your list since it only really makes sense at a certain scale and if you can make use of the providers on it. Most of the networks you'll have trouble getting to via transit providers are that way because of how they do business, which also means hardly any of them peer at IXes. I'd say a network should have a least 3 good transits before considering an IX. Even then it's not so black and white. If after your first transit provider is installed and you set up your flow monitoring, you notice most of your traiffic is going to/coming from ASNs that peer on your local exchanges, then it absolutely makes sense to open a connection right then. IX links aren't a whole lot cheaper than transit (sometimes they cost more depending on how hard it is to get to them) and many networks will benefit from a more diverse blend of transits than IX peering regardless of what they're doing. IXes are extremely important to the internet at large, but they're not for everyone. -Matt On Dec 15, 2018 10:27, "Mike Hammett" < na...@ics-il.net > wrote: I think it'll depend on your target customer. Residential eyeball? Being on an IX is more important at nearly any size than which transit you choose. Even a good-sized residential eyeball (say 10k and up subs) can be good with Cogent\IX\one other transit. Hosting and enterprise-focused ISPs will need to diversify their transit providers more. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP From: "Mehmet Akcin" < meh...@akcin.net > To: "nanog" < nanog@nanog.org > Sent: Friday, December 14, 2018 9:21:59 AM Subject: How to choose a transit provider? Hello there, I have started writing a blog which I hope it would help buy transit services from providers by doing various due diligences(technical) i wanted to reach out and ask nanog community’s thoughts on this. What are some of your checklist items ? Price? Their directly peered networks? If they are tier 2,3 who they use as tier 1-2? Are the onnet? I am sure list goes on and on on... Thanks a lot for your help. I plan to write the blog this month and publish. Mehmet -- Mehmet +1-424-298-1903
