I am just guessing but you probably have not been in the service provider space. Peering in my experience has always required an ASN and BGP as a pre-requisite. That is because all service providers use BGP communities and various other mechanisms to control these connections. Sure you could do a point to point static routed circuit but do you really expect me to put in static routes for your network and then make sure I don’t announce them to the wrong places under my AS number? Oh, and I supposed I have to write ACLs for all of your netblocks to be certain that you don't use me for transit. Uhhhh, nope. Our networks are far to large and complex to manually manage like that. Just try to ask a provider to do that. When he stops laughing, let me know what he says.
ISPs, by the way, peer in order to minimize the amount of transit they have to purchase (almost all ISPs smaller than a tier 1 have at least some paid transit) and to direct traffic off of congested links. If a direct connection to NetFlix saves me money on transit and helps my customers that is what I will do. The name of the game is to decongest your network for the least amount of money. That is usually done by getting the traffic directly to an efficient exit point ASAP over the least expensive transport medium. Please don’t go on and on about what might work in theory regarding interconnection, a lot of the people on here are the ones that know how things work in reality. Reality is that no one will peer with you without an AS and your own space that goes with that. If you have not reached that level of sophistication, nobody is peering with you. Steven Naslund Chicago IL On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 8:51 PM, Brett Glass <na...@brettglass.com> wrote: > Netflix's arrangement isn't "peeering." (They call it that, > misleadingly, as a way of attempting to characterize the connection as > one that doesn't require money to change hands.) > > ISPs peer to connect their mutual Internet customers. Netflix is not > an ISP, so it cannot be said to be "peering." It's merely establishing > a dedicated link to an ISP while trying to avoid paying the ISP for > the resources used. > > But regardless of the financial arrangements, such a connection > doesn't require an ASN or BGP. In fact, it doesn't even require a > registered IP address at either end! A simple Ethernet connection (or > a leased line of any kind, in fact; it could just as well be a virtual > circuit) and a static route would work just fine. > > --Brett Glass
