Telecom Ramblings has a post chatting with Peter Cohen who is VP at QTS. So why would I listen to Peter. Because he has proven invaluable in our past discussions to understand how peering works. Before QTS Peter was at Netflix and before that he was at AWS.

Here is an example of Peter’s review of the past.

This created a reliance on infrastructure in 10 cities or so nationally, and these companies are beholden to those data centers and are subject to cost, power, and space limitations, and to the policies, of those data centers, some of which were never designed with this in mind. This really is putting all your eggs in one basket repeatedly. Having everyone’s peering fail over to another city hundreds of miles away is not a real great plan for long-term growth in the longevity and stability of the internet, but that's kind of where we're at now.

Peter touches on technology changes.

First of all, the lower costs and greater availability of optics has made for larger connections and decreased costs those router-to-router connections. Second, the transport and remote end peering piece, which can be a scaling issue for some companies, has also developed, enabling the connection of hardware to an exchange point or to a data center but actually have the router reside elsewhere.

So what is a better future?

With regards to infrastructure, it’s the thought of metro redundancy. As an operator I would want to be able to be connected to all those destinations in a secondary location as well, and have that traffic resolved within my market, rather than leaving that market and hairpinning it back in order to deliver traffic.

As 5G gets discussed the peering issues will continue and as the bandwidth goes up and the advertised latency becomes expected.