[ncc-regional-middle-east] Regional Peering

Dear All,
Kindly find below a writeup about the importance of establishing peering 
connectivity between the regional ISP's, please feel free to correct or 
comment on any technical or linguistic information in the writeup below.

Saleem Al-Balooshi
UAEnic
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Internet started for public use in most of the regional countries 
"ME&NA" in 1995 and 1996, during that period all the ISP's in the ME&NA 
were connected via satellite to the transit Internet backbone providers 
in the US and EU.

During that time the round trip delays for an ICMP packet for example 
from UAE to Qatar used to take more than 1200 ms using following path:

1. Round trip time for the satellite connection from UAE to US was 
around 600 ms.

2. Round trip time for the satellite connection for Qatar to Us was 
around 600 ms.

As the demand for internet access services increased in the region the 
need for faster connectivity and better performance increased as well. 
Several ISP's started to migrate its internet connectivity from 
satellite to Fiber cables, In 1998 “Etisalat” established a fiber optic 
connectivity from the UAE (DXB) to US (NY), and introduced the first 
regional

Transit IP provider (EMIX), several ISP's in the region used EMIX as 
it's transit IP provider and other used direct fiber connectivity to 
transit providers in the EU and US.

Two type of relationships between the ISP's:

1. Transit Providers and customers: The internet service providers that 
provide it's customers with full BGP routing table for multi-homed 
customers or default route for single homed customers in order to 
transit via it's network to all the destinations in the interne. The 
customers pay’s agreed fees to it's transit provider.

Example:

- Transit provider ASN is 8961

- Customer ASN is 5384 Prefix’s originated are "194.170/16" and "195.229/16"

- In this example with Transit relationship, the transit provider 
(AS8961) sends

the full BGP routing table to it's customer (AS5384).

- And the Customer (AS5384) send its originated routes (194.170/16 and

195.229/16) to its AS8961.

2. Peering relationship: Two ISP's agrees the exchange it's locally 
originated traffic between each other via a mutual agreement, and each 
ISP takes care of it's part of the connectivity (Usually no IP port 
charges are involved)

Example:

- ISP1 it's ASN is 5384 and the routes originated are "194.170/16 and

195.229/16"

- ISP2 it's ASN is 8961 and the routes originated are "217.164/16", AS 
8961 has a

customer who's ASN is 8966 and the routes originated are "213.42/16"

- ISP1 and ISP2 decided to establish a peering relationship in this case 
they

establish the physical connectivity configure the BGP session between 
the directly

connected routers.

- ISP1 apply filters in it's BGP configuration so that only the routes 
originated

- from AS5384 are sent to AS8966, and only receives the routes 
originated from AS8961 and AS8966.

- ISP2 apply filters in it's BGP configuration so that only routes 
originated from

AS8961 and AS8966 are sent to AS5384 and only receives the routes 
originated from AS5384.

*_Advantages of peering_*:

   1. Improves network performance for the traffic exchanged directly
      between the ISP's, i.e traffic between UAE and Qatar even after
      migrating to cable used to take more that 700ms since their was no
      direct connectivity between the two neighboring countries and
      traffic used to follow in the following path:

UAE -- UK -- US(NY) -- US (LA) -- HK -- Qatar.

After establishing the direct peering connectivity the performance 
reduced to less than 20ms.

   2. Improve the availability by reducing the number of hubs (point of
      failure) between the two ISP's.
   3. Reduce the overall network cost, since the traffic will be
      exchanged via a cheaper cost instead of traveling via the transit
      provider link which is very costly.
   4. Improve network security avoiding sending the regional traffic via
      3rd parties.

Despite the above facts, during my involvement in EMIX development and 
operation, I have noticed following scenarios:

1. An ISP used to have 2 separate connectivity to EMIX, one for it's 
residential customers traffic and the other for it's business customers 
traffic. The traffic exchanged between residential customers network to 
a business customer used to travel via EMIX in the UAE.

I have visited this ISP and found both the business units in the same 
campus, when I asked the technical people for the reason they tolled me 
it's just internal competition reasons between the Business units.

2. Another case where we had two competing ISP's from the same countries 
located in the same building were connected to EMIX and used to exchange 
it's local customers traffic via EMIX.

*_The way Forwared:_*

1. The Telecom regulatory authorities in the countries should understand 
the advantages of the peering and try to enforce the ISP's in the 
country to establish peering connectivity either by establishing a 
county wide exchange point or direct connectivity between each two ISP's.

2. The ISP's in the region should communicate with each other and 
establish its direct connectivity in order to exchange it's locally 
originated traffic.

Conclusion:

Peering between the ISP's in the region is an important step for the 
improvement of the performance of internet infrastructure and the 
experience of the internet users in the region.

*_Useful documents on this subject:_*

http://www.equinix.com/pdf/whitepapers/Business_case.pdf

http://www.equinix.com/pdf/whitepapers/PeeringWP.2.pdf