Akamai Peering

[Jawaid Bazyar <jbazyar () verobroadband com>]

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


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Jawaid Bazyar
Chief Technical Officer
VERO Broadband
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jbazyar () verobroadband com<mailto:jbazyar () verobroadband com>
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