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Comment by rsaxvc | Hacker News Reader

When I had AT&T VDSL they had weak peering. Some traffic that should have gone across town would routinely get routed several states away before coming back to town, because they hadn't peered with the local exchanges. Some traffic was ok.

When I switched to an ISP with local peering, ping times between my home and my server downtown dropped to a few milliseconds. It's like being on my LAN.

If this is still an issue for AT&T, traceroute+reverse DNS of each router may indicate it.

This poor peering isn't directly a throughput problem, but really increases the chance of being routed through a congested link, which you could sometimes guestimate from ping times and peeringdb.

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Same issue in Canada: our big ISPs historically refuse to peer freely at our domestic IXs like TORIX. So smaller ISP and DCs end up peering with them in the USA and your packets would make circuitous cross-border round trips to go a few km.

Some national players do have ports at domestic IXs, but only as backup links or for negotiated (paid?) access.

The hazards of ISPs also being backbone providers.

(It looks like Rogers has gotten better with this behaviour)

As far as I can tell, Bell holds its Canadian customers hostage to force peers to pay them for what should be mutually beneficial peering. It does not participate in _ANY_ of the Canadian internet exchanges. Even Rogers connects to TORIX.

https://bgp.he.net/AS577#_ix

I know Rogers for a while had 'conditional' peering at Torix, but doing some traceroutes now, more routes are going through Torix than I recall in the past. Seems like they've lightened up over the past couple years.

Too bad the indie ISP market has been decimated. Ebox & Distributel --> Bell. Start --> Telus. Oxio --> Cogeco. VMedia --> Quebecor (Videotron). Mostly only Teksavvy left standing

Indeed with Bell & Telus, you could only peer freely on US soil:

https://www.peeringdb.com/net/1550 https://www.peeringdb.com/net/76

Because they believe you are customers.

This is no different than me approaching Verizon or at&t and demanding they peer with me.

As it turns out, I am a Bell retail customer being held hostage by their refusal to engage in seemingly any settlement-free peering with other Canadian networks. I am only their customer because the third-party providers indicated that they were unable to provide service despite Bell DSL service being subject to local-loop unbundling. As the monopoly incumbent that has received significant subsidy to develop their services, I believe they should have a duty to peer at not-for-profit Canadian internet exchanges that meet minimum traffic and peer diversity thresholds.

I agree in that the Canadian ISP market has had a rough ride for a long time. Until the mid 2000s when Cogent and other folks (GTT) rolled into Canada, TELUS, Bell and other companies were charging obscene rates for IP transit.

For several years the TELUS and Bell peering PNIs (OC12s back then) would run hot regularly in domestic Canada - for years.

You'll never get them to peer openly, but at best you can get them to offer market rates for paid peer (which is what folks have tried to do in the US).

> You’ll never get them to peer openly

Maybe I’ve got it wrong, but don’t my peeringdb links suggest Bell and Telus do peer openly, but only on US soil?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35595697

My recollection is that they're still selective in the US. Maybe that's changed.

This has nothing to do with torix. This has to do with bell and telus sees you as customers, not peers.

Yep. I'm still on AT&T's ADSL (what used to be known as Uverse) and routinely get routed through Chicago rather than Detroit (I live 30 mi north) for major services like Cloudflare. Of the two choices I have for ISP, AT&T or Comcast, only AT&T has such poor routing. AT&T Fiber apparently has better peering but their supposed expansion hasn't happened in my area yet.

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