In this second article in our “reasons to peer” series, we explain how peering can help you to lower your costs.

Companies need ever increasing amounts of bandwidth – video conferencing, a multitude of SaaS applications, video streaming, and the likes, all demand fast, efficient connections. And this comes at a cost.

Peering vs. transit

Most often, companies connect to the Internet via IP transit: you pay a network for Internet access. With peering, however, two (or more) networks exchange traffic cost-neutrally with each other. By connecting to an Internet Exchange, networks can peer with hundreds of networks.

In many cases, all around the world, the cost of traffic via peering at an Internet Exchange is also cheaper than using transit. Many organisations are therefore turning to peering to reduce costs.

Peering is about performance

Exceptions are of course possible, depending on your region and on the volume of usage of peering and transit ports. But beyond the cost discussion, peering is all about performance. Keep an eye on the follow-up articles in this series, in which we look at the performance-related benefits of peering.
You can read the previous article in the Reasons To Peer series below :

• 1. Peering Raises Your Revenue