Negotiating your first peering agreement without crying

I've been through this enough times at three different facilities. Here's what actually works.

1. Know your traffic ratio before you email anyone. If you're 9:1 outbound, you're not a peer—you're a customer. Be honest about it.

2. Start with the IXPs you both already join. Contabo and Vultr both show up at the same regional exchanges? Mention that. Same building? Better.

3. Your first email should include: ASN, PeeringDB link, traffic estimate in Gbps, and list of mutual IXPs. Keep it under 150 words. The NOC engineer reading it has forty others in queue.

4. Be patient. I waited 11 months for one peer, 8 for another. The 14-month one still stings—we signed in November, they filed Chapter 11 in December. That's the game.

5. Have your side ready before they ask. Prefix limits, MD5 if they want it, route filters. Nothing kills momentum like "uh, let me check."

6. Accept that most requests die in silence. It's not personal; it's just not worth their router CPU.

Good luck. The second agreement is easier.

— Carl

Thank you for writing this, @Carl. I may be wrong, but I think many people overlook the traffic ratio point. In Asia-Pacific, some networks will not even reply if your ratio is worse than 3:1. I have found that being direct about this in the first message saves time for both sides.

Now it's all PeeringDB bots and automated prefix validation. The relationships were warmer then, even if the gear ran hotter.