i've ever had the experience where even though it looked like there was no issues on your end for your internet
connection lots of websites are loading extremely slowly or not at all or maybe
you've even had the opportunity to see the wonders of youtube loading videos
and 144p despite the fact that you have
fiber well if you've tried all the usual steps to fix your connection like
rebooting your router adjusting your dns settings or switching to a wired
Ethernet connection and still nothing helps not even calling your isp chances
are there's a peering issue to blame but
what the heck does that mean all right so because the internet is not one
centralized network it has to work through different physical networks
connecting to each other through some sort of agreement the largest networks
called tier one networks connect to each other using something called settlement
free peering what this means is that they agree to carry each other's data
without an expectation of payment strictly speaking peering technically
refers to no cost arrangements such as these for the purposes of this video
we're using a broader definition where peering refers to any agreement between
networks to carry data including paid agreements anyhow these big tier 1
networks can reach the entire internet without having to pay for the privilege
for example our american viewers will recognize big names such as att
centurylink and sprint which have tier 1 networks however most isps are tier 2 or
tier 3 networks a tier 2 network can do
some free peering with other networks but has to pay money or purchase transit
to tier 1 services to access portions of the internet while a tier 3 network
only purchases transit and then sells the internet access they bought to
consumers typically all this behind the scenes buying and selling results in a
seamless experience for the user whether you're trying to view a website hosted
halfway around the world or just watch another fine episode of techwiki but
sometimes a poorly conceived peering agreement can really gum up the works
you see peering agreements usually include an understanding about how much
bandwidth each network can use if one network's data ends up hitting a
bandwidth cap or overwhelming the second network throttling and slowdowns can
result and that's something you're gonna experience this famously happened with
netflix when cogent a tier one network that carried lots of netflix traffic had
a dispute with comcast since netflix traffic takes up a surprisingly large
chunk of internet bandwidth its data ended up throttled when it hit comcast
servers before it was able to make its way to viewers at home dear to sheer
volume and because it puts so much load on comcast comcast asked cogent to start
paying for access to its network as previously the two were connected by a
settlement free peering when cogent said lol no comcast fired back by essentially
allowing all that traffic at the interconnection point to bottleneck and
guess what customers got choppy video until the two companies decided to bury
the hatchet but in the meantime netflix went straight to comcast for a better
deal and paid for the privilege of hooking up its servers directly to
comcast's network obviating some of the need to buy transit from tier 1 cogent
there have actually been a number of instances of peering shenanigans over the years whether it be from one side's
infrastructure not being up to scratch or business disputes such as the netflix
example we just discussed but if you're faced with slowdowns at home because of
peering problems you can try using a vpn and if that doesn't work well there's
not much else you can do other than wait for the problem to get resolved or just
switch isps because you know what we all have plenty of those to choose from
right
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