Internet Solutions to implement more open peering policy

Better late than never I suppose.
We need a much better and broader reaching peering policy in SA.
 
Not sure what IS is changing, is JINX not hosted at IS?
Are they loosing out to NAPAfrica (teraco)?

The article from 2012 needs updating:
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/telecoms/65866-who-peers-for-free-and-who-doesnt.html

Well they had an terrible peering policy. Anyway - NAPAfrica (https://www.peeringdb.com/ix/592) has way more peers than JINX (https://www.peeringdb.com/ix/129).

There was a time when networks had the idea "my network is more valuable than yours so therefore you have to pay me" and the only people that lost was the customers. Luckily the world moved on.
 
Well they had an terrible peering policy. Anyway - NAPAfrica (https://www.peeringdb.com/ix/592) has way more peers than JINX (https://www.peeringdb.com/ix/129).
You need to be careful about conflating the separate issues of exchange points and the peering policies of the individual networks at these exchange points. Internet Solutions has been at all 6 exchange points in South Africa for a long time https://www.peeringdb.com/net/179 but have changed the way they peer at these locations. None of the exchange points in South Africa have mandatory peering requirements for networks - but do offer route servers to ease the access to peering for smaller networks.

There are also a number of ways to evaluate the "size" of an Internet Exchange besides peer count. JINX and NAP Africa Joburg are within 15% of each other in terms of prefix/route count. There are certainly many more networks connected to the NAPAfrica exchanges, including a large number of small stub networks. The majority of the medium and large networks are connected to multiple exchanges for redundancy (and other reasons) and I would not be surprised if networks that value their uptime and reliability start forcing their bigger peers to peer with them redundantly.

There was a time when networks had the idea "my network is more valuable than yours so therefore you have to pay me" and the only people that lost was the customers. Luckily the world moved on.
A well functioning market has a way of putting powerful gorillas in their place over time. We have seen this shift with all of the historically powerful ISPs in South Africa. The issue you describe has not gone away though - the centers of power have just shifted. :sneaky:
 
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X