Shaking Hands with Giants

Shaking Hands with Giants: Peering, Interconnects and Your Content

The old adage, “It’s better to be a big fish in a little pond, than a little fish in a big pond” doesn’t apply to the Internet. If you are big in a little pond, it just means your pond isn’t important. Interconnecting and Peering with big portals and international providers allow for the little fish to talk directly to the big fish and get their content out on the Internet without the costly infrastructure. But how does a little fish get to talk with the big giants? Vancouver Colocation is the answer.

Presence in major interconnect points is like having a membership at an exclusive club. You can sit there and not talk (No need to interconnect because your content is not latency, mission critical or time sensitive) or you can interconnect (talk to the famous and rich for a price – important if you have content you need to get out right away).  Vancouver Colocation can provide you with such opportunities. Alternatively, you can use our location and infrastructure to connect directly with the Tier 1 providers of our choice.  Either way, the opportunity is there to increase how quickly and to how many people your content is distributed. Your content could be anything from podcasts to snapshots of your newest painting.

As your traffic needs become more pronounced, so will your peering needs. Now you have enough content to be a big fish, and others will want to grab it from you and give you their content in return instead of charging you transit fees.  Peering arrangements can help reduce your costs for data transmission as well as increase your reach. This is what the Internet is all about – connecting to as many uplinks as possible resulting in as many distribution points as possible.

The other benefit of peering is reducing your dependency on one uplink while providing best possible routing. Traditionally it was thought an impressive benefit to have more than one uplink provider. But realistically, why just stop there? Why not have multiple. Peering does not set a limit for how many peers or uplink providers you can have – the more, the merrier. Doing the peering yourself can of course be costly (from an equipment point of view) but that is precisely why facilities such as Vancouver Colocation can provide the means to access interconnect points without the hassle of managing your own interconnect equipment.

Give us a call at 604-473-9700 to get a quote on our bandwidth pricing!