When you start peering, you’ll have to decide what peering policy to choose.
Peering policies tend to boil down to open, selective and restrictive. Which of them is worth to choose?
When you first start peering over a single internet exchange, it’s very simple. Your internet exchange connection has a relatively high monthly cost, but no metered per-megabit costs. So once you take the plunge and connect on an internet exchange, you’ll want to fill up that circuit as much as possible and save money on metered transit circuits. You adopt an open peering policy and peer with anyone. Your peering policy only has some “sanity checks”, such as public AS number and public address prefix(es), Network Operations Center reachable 24/7, notifications for maintenance and outages.
Although it can happen that a malicious peer points a default route or other static route towards your router and thus routes his traffic through your network without your permission.
Things get more complex when you start peering in multiple locations... Read more
