Hello.
I am wondering how the peering points or internet exchange points work and how one may gain connect their own network to one of these points?
Is this basically a good old boy club were they can blackball you if they don't like the way you look or are their guidelines in place for this?
The information I found online is very unclear on exactly how the whole things works, it seem to suggest that these are backroom secret deals and arrangements.
I was just wondering if anyone here has any experiencing with working with one of these peering points centers?
Thanks.
Very quick summary here:
As the NSFnet was privatized, NSF grant sponsored the development of the first exchange points. At that time media was typically FDDI, ATM, or SMDS (in the case of the CIX), so you had the option of using transport to getting to the facility.
As Ethernet took over the world, and traffic volumes kept growing, it eventually became necessary for carriers to meet in the same place. Sprint led an RFP in 2000 for a series of carrier neutral exchange points, and that business has pretty much fallen to (or been acquired by) Equinix.
As for how things work, it varies:
Interconnection may be public (via a shared, switched Ethernet fabric, typically run by the facility operator], or private (via facility XC.)
As to who will exchange traffic with you, some people are happy to peer (exchange traffic) with all comers, some try (like, say, Comcast) try to extort you for access to their customers. (settlement-based peering.)
In all cases, it's a business decision -- your network has to be seen to provide enough value to justify the capital and operational expense of connecting to you.
It's not necessarily a "good old boy club," but certainly the Internet operational community isn't all that large and people do tend to know each other.
Generally speaking, though, at least domestically, internet transit has become so cheap over the last 10 years, that it's generally cheaper to just buy from someone else who deals with these things for you than to peer. When you reach the scaling point where it'll make sense to do these things, you'll know.