Akamai Peering

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1

Hi,

We had Akamai servers in our data center for many years until a couple years ago, when they said they’d changed their policies and decommissioned the servers.

I understand that, maintaining many server sites and being responsible for that hardware, even if you pay nothing for power or collocation, must be costly. And at the time, we didn’t have much traffic to them.

Today, however, we’re hitting 6 Gbps with them nightly. Not sure what traffic it is they’re hosting but it’s surely video of some sort.

We are in the same data center with them, Edgeconnex Denver, and they refuse to peer because they say their minimum traffic level for peering is 30 Gbps.

Their peeringdb entry says “open peering”, and in my book that’s not open peering.

So this seems to be exactly backward from where every other major content provider is going – free peering with as many eyeball networks as possible.

Google – no bandwidth minimum, and, they cover costs on 1st and every other cross connect

Amazon – peers are two Denver IX

Apple – peers at two Denver IX

Netflix – free peering everywhere

And, on top of that, Akamai is not at either of the two Denver exchange points, which push together probably half a terabit of traffic.

What is the financial model for Akamai to restrict peering this way? Surely it’s not the 10G ports and optics, which are cheap as dirt these days.

Doesn’t this policy encourage eyeballs to move this traffic to their cheapest possible transit links, with a potential degradation of service for Akamai’s content customers?

Thanks for the insight,

Jawaid

2

Akamai isn’t supporting 10g ports on IXPs. I’d be surprised if the allowed it on PNIs. As for not being on the IXPs, that’s odd.

3

I'll provide a bit more detail - We have certainly been
standardizing on 100G for a number of years now and have a decreasing
number of devices where 10G is appropriate.

  for public peering we certainly do have an open peering policy,
if you are encountering an issue please reach out and I can identify
what the root cause is. If you have a ticket number, etc.. that can
help as well. I don't personally monitor the ticket queue.

  For private interconnect, 100G is the port speed for most of the
americas, some markets may vary.

  For public peering, so much depends on the IX/IXP. EdgeconneX
in Denver does not have access to the Denver IX and we are working to
extend there. There's at least 4 different sites in Denver for
interconnection, and it's impractical to be in them all.

  Some more details would be helpful (in private) so we can move
the traffic to a direct path.

  If you have a 10G port and want to swap it to a 100G port, we
should have that conversation.

  - Jared