I read with some excitement that South African ISP MWEB have disconnected their transit connections with other ISPs in South Africa, claiming that their existing services from Vodacom and Telkom South Africa were congested and expensive, and detrimental to the quality of internet services in the country.

According to the RIPE RIS service, the links between MWEB (AS10474) to Telkom South Africa (AS5713) were disconnected on the November 2nd – Telkom being the original transit provider that MWEB used.

MWEB have detected that congestion reduces, therefore service levels increase when traffic bypasses the incumbent and is delivered directly to other ISPs in their region via peering links.  If a network refuses to peer, MWEB simply deliver the traffic to local providers via their international links – possibly just as congested, but available at a fraction of a cost.  If traffic is then delivered to the incumbents via links they themselves pay for, the incumbents also have a financial incentive to peer.

Peering is the best way to encourage enormous capacities between ISPs and other networks, because a direct one-to-one connection can be monitored and well managed in order to guarantee availability for internet traffic.  Peering therefore increases available bandwidth and reduces bandwidth costs.  This will enable high the sort of services that require high-bandwidth availability, like streaming media and high definition video conferencing.

Interestingly, thirty minutes after the adjacency with Telkom was severed, it appeared that MWEB picked up a new transit customer – Yebo, AS12258, with Yebo’s prefixes being advertised to Interoute (again, according to RIPE RIS).  The commercial nature of this downstream relationship is, however, not revealed by the routing table.

The incumbent is perfectly entitled to – and well placed to – sell excellent transit links into the local market, but their strategy to do that, as I explained in my last article, must be to make the transit product in their key regions excellent – this means to peer with the key other local providers (not all providers) in the market, and to ensure that capacities across their backbone and to customers are well managed and available for traffic.