Packet Clearing House Bill Woodcock Marco Frigino Packet Clearing House November 21, 2016 2016 Survey of Internet Carrier Interconnection Agreements
Jun 11, 2020
Packet Clearing House
Bill WoodcockMarco Frigino
Packet Clearing HouseNovember 21, 2016
2016 Survey of Internet Carrier
Interconnection Agreements
Packet Clearing House
PCH Peering Survey 2011Five years ago, PCH conducted the first-ever broad survey of Internet peering agreements.
We asked ISPs to tell us three things about each of their peering agreements:
• Is the agreement formalized in a written document, or is it a “handshake” agreement?
• Does the agreement have symmetric terms, or do the parties exchange different things?
• What is the country of governing law of the agreement?
Packet Clearing House
PCH Peering Survey 2011The previous largest survey analyzed sixteen agreements, all in the United States. In 2011 we analyzed 142,210 agreements from 4,331 Internet service provider networks in 96 countries.https://pch.net/resources/papers/peering-survey
Packet Clearing House
The 2011 report has been downloadedmore than 500,000 times in five years
1
10
100
1000
10000
100000
1000000
Dec-12 Apr-13 Aug-13Dec-13 Apr-14 Aug-14Dec-14 Apr-15 Aug-15Dec-15 Apr-16 Aug-16
Dow
nloa
ds p
er M
onth
Packet Clearing House
In 2011, we promised to repeat the survey every five years, in order to document trends in the industry and begin building time-series data.
Packet Clearing House
“The PCH peering survey provides a unique insight into why the Internet’s model of traffic exchange has been so successful around the world. It underlines the degree of global uniformity across regulatory regimes that would otherwise not be able to harmonize among themselves. This information is invaluable to our work in providing advice to policy makers.”
– Dr. Sam Paltridge Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation OECD
Packet Clearing House
PCH Peering Survey 2016Today, we’re publishing the results of our 2016 survey.In addition to the three questions we asked in 2011...
• Is the agreement formalized in a written document, or is it a “handshake” agreement?
• Does the agreement have symmetric terms, or do the parties exchange different things?
• What is the country of governing law of the agreement?We added one more question:
• Are you exchanging IPv6 traffic with this peer?
Packet Clearing House
PCH Peering Survey 2016We analyzed 1,935,822 interconnection agreements representing 10,794 carrier networks in 148 countries including all 35 OECD member countries and 21 UN LDCs.
Packet Clearing House
Proportion of Representation
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900
US RU UK DE ID FR AU CA NL PL BR UA JP IT CZ CH AT ZA BG EU BD NZ AR SE IE SG HK ES NO BE
59.6% overall
Packet Clearing House
PCH Peering Survey 2016955,510 of the agreements (49.35% of the total) comprised 477,755 matching pairs, in which both parties to the same agreement responded to our survey, and in 98.71% of those cases, both parties’ answers to each of the questions were in agreement.That’s a slight decrease from 99.52% five years ago, and we attribute that to the addition of the IPv6 question. The more questions we ask, the more opportunities exist for disagreement between each pair of answers.In addition to the survey, we conducted unstructured follow-up interviews with 35 of the responding networks.
Packet Clearing House
Key Findings99.93% of peering agreements are informal “handshake” agreements, in which both parties agree to abide by globally-recognized terms. This is up from 99.51% in 2011. From 1 in 200 then to 1 in 1,400 today.
This finding was not thrown off by unrepresentational participation: essentially all major backbone providers are represented in the data-set.
Follow-up interviews with holders of written contracts indicated that, while the contracts are being allowed to expire, the relationships they formalized continue to grow.
Packet Clearing House
Key Findings99.98% of peering agreements had symmetric terms, in which each party gave and received the same conditions as the other. This is up from 99.73% in 2011. From 1 in 400 then to 1 in 4,800 today.
Market-dominant incumbents routinely advance the fiction that “paid peering” or minimum peering requirements are commonplace. They exist do exist, but in vanishingly small numbers, and those numbers continue to decline rapidly relative to overall growth.
Packet Clearing House
Key FindingsStrong preferences continue to exist for contractual country of governing law, closely paralleling perceived law & order and the degree to which legislation and governmental policy protect carriers from liability for content. The United States, Canada, and Japan remain favored and, post-Snowden, Iceland and Finland join the list of favored countries. By contrast Romania, the Ukraine, and Russia continue to be selected least often, and China and Thailand join them this year near the bottom of the list.
Packet Clearing House
Country of Governing Law
00.10.20.30.40.50.60.70.80.91
US CA FI JP IS SG UK EE IE NL VN SI SK AE KH CN TH RO UA RU
Packet Clearing House
Key FindingsNearly all peering is multilateral peering, implemented through route-servers and multilateral agreements.
Incumbents often attempt to deride multilateral peering as peripheral and inconsequential. In fact, it was already becoming the dominant practice in 2011, and now accounts for the vast majority of AS adjacencies.
Multilateral peering commands less mind-share because it’s fire-and-forget. An agreement is established once, and continues to accrue new participants over time.
Packet Clearing House
Interconnection Partners per Network
1
10
100
1000
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500
– Jak
arta M
LPA– M
osco
w MLP
A
– Lon
don M
LPA
Packet Clearing House
Jakarta Matrix Exchange MLPA
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
1,010 1,020 1,030 1,040 1,050 1,060 1,070 1,080 1,090
Packet Clearing House
Countries that Benefit from MLPAs
1
10
100
1,000
10,000
100,000
1,000,000
10,000,000
ID FR UKRUDE AU US PL CA NL SG CZ CH ZA BD AR JP BGHK IT AT NZ IE UA PH TZ KRNGAEMLPAs
Adjacencies
Peers
Packet Clearing House
Key FindingsOnly 74,886 (3.88%) were exchanging IPv6 traffic, while 1,854,411 (96.12%) were not. This is an unfortunate finding, as we are now twenty years into IPv6 deployment.
Of the thirty most-represented countries in our dataset, Russia had the highest average rate of IPv6 routing at 21%, followed by the Ukraine at 10%, Brazil at 6%, and the United States at 4.7%. Every other country in the top thirty fell below the global average of 3.88%
Packet Clearing House
IPv6 Routing
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
RU UA BR US CH AT BE JP CZ IT SE GBSGBGCA ZA NZ NO PL IE HK DE BD ES NL AR AU FR ID
Packet Clearing House
21%
4.7%
0.2%
Packet Clearing House
IPv6 Routing
$1,000
$10,000
$100,000
$1,000,000
0.01% 0.10% 1% 10% 100%
ID
OMMT
PKMD
RU
GM
KZ
PS
KGUG RWMGMW
QA NO CHLULI
USFI
Packet Clearing House
American Interconnection Partners
Others32%
CA2%AU
3%
RU5%ID
5%FR5%
UK7%
NL7%
DE11%
Domestic23%
Others41%
NL4%
DE5%UK
7%RU16%
Domestic27%
Packet Clearing House
Russian Interconnection Partners
Others18% CH
1%FR2% ID
2%NL3%UA3%UK3%
DE5%
US6%
Domestic57%
Others9%US
2%UA5%
Domestic84%
Packet Clearing House
British Interconnection Partners
Others28%
ZA2%IT
2%ID3%RU
4%NL5%FR
5%
DE7%
US10%
Domestic33%
Others7%UA
3%IT
13%
US30%
RU47%
Domestic1%
Packet Clearing House
German Interconnection Partners
Others31%
SG3%IT
3%
FR5%RU
5%UK6%
ID7%
NL10%
US13%
Domestic17%
Others9%
IT17%
RU30%
US41%
Domestic3%
Packet Clearing House
IPv4 Size Relative to Number of Interconnections
1
10
100
1,000
10,000
100,000
1,000,000
10,000,000
100,000,000
0 250 500 750 1000 1250 1500 1750 2000
IPv4 Prefixes
IPv4 Addresses
Packet Clearing House
1
100
10,000
1,000,000
100,000,000
10,000,000,000
0 250 500 750 1000 1250 1500 1750 2000
IPv6 Size Relative to Number of Interconnections
IPv6 Prefixes
IPv6 Addresses(divided by 10^24 for clarity)
Packet Clearing House
Thanks, and Questions?
Copies of this presentation are available in PDF format.
Bill WoodcockExecutive Director
Packet Clearing [email protected]+1 415 831 3103
This presentation is ©2016 by Packet Clearing House CC BY-NC-SA