I would like to write about something that is not shared very openly among the new generation of college graduates of the new Internet age. As most of us that has been in the field since the early days know that BGP, Border Gateway Protocol is the glue that ties the entire global Internet together without it we wouldnt have the robust network of networks we have today. BGP is made of thousands of AS Numbers that advertise IP Prefixes such as 130.1.0.0/24 which represents a network of 254 hosts.
When explaining AS numbers the best way to describe them is think of it as a bubble with IP prefixes inside them then you have datacenters across the globe where these big telephone companies, cable, ISP, Content providers have there core network equipment usually some big Cisco / Juniper / Force10 Networks switch. This is where all of these providers interconnect to each other with Fiber Optic cables that will swap network data traffic between each other to reach there destinations. Basically they will have private BGP peering agreements with a fixed traffic ratio or a public peering agreement with less strict ratios depending on the network provider.
On this end normally the big Telco's are very strict with peering arrangements because of there large status as Tier 1 providers I will get into this a little later on. Now the more providers that interconnect the better connected the Internet is together and in normal scenarios it will mean bigger connections on moving traffic from one network provider to another. Without these arangements we would not have what we call the Internet today because each of these networks would have no way of reaching another network provider customer / content because it would essentially be a black hole because the IP Prefix would not have been learned from the other provider.
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