Philip Smith's Internet Development Site

The https://www.peeringdb.com/ is a freely available, user-maintained database of networks which take part in the global Internet. It is considered the authoritative source of all information relating to network operators who participate in peering around the world.

The database facilitates the global interconnection of networks at Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), data centres, and other interconnection facilities, and is the first stop in making interconnection decisions.

In the early Internet (of the 1990s) there were few network operators and interconnect points around the world that interconnections were relatively straightforward to seek out and implement (in the author's experience anyway). In March 1999 there were 4640 ASNs in the Internet with only 800 providing transit. This compares with today's total exceeding 73000 ASNs and over 10000 ASNs providing transit, never mind that almost every country in the world now has at least one Internet Exchange Point if not a datacentre facilitating commercial interconnects.

In the 1990s establishing new interconnects by attending in major Internet operations meetings (NANOG, RIPE, AfNOG, APRICOT and so on), with network information passed on by word of mouth or email or even by letter!

With the rapid growth of the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there needed to be a more scalable way for a Network Operator to get their “peering information” out to the global Internet operations community. And hence the PeeringDB was born.

The Peering DB is a repository of the important information that network operators need to determine whether an interconnection is feasible, makes commercial sense, makes technical sense, and is even technically feasible. While the Peering DB website has much more detailed information, the Peering Toolbox is highlighting the key points.

Here are some example entries to show what is possible. The first example (publicly accessible) is of LINX, the London Internet Exchange:

which shows a screen capture of what is available at their LON1 site, a scrollable list of the participants, how to contact LINX, etc.

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