This is great! I wonder how much the presenters country - the Netherlands - has made this easier with the peering. It’s hard for me to imagine just asking big serious networks to patch you in down here in Switzerland is likely to fly.
One may have a good chance talking to people behind projects like https://www.community-ix.net/ and good old in-person networking in places like RIPE meetings. Basically everyone there including people working for large telcos have a personal interest in supporting independent structures.
It does seem easiest to start with an IX, where you can follow the published rules to join the IX and connection your network to it’s without bothering every other member.
But if you’ve only ever read about BGP and this is your first time putting it into practice, an exchange seems like the easier way to gain the practice. Most of them have simple rules that you can read in advance, and often your first port is free.
Certainly not via route servers or typical bilateral peering configurations - but transit-over-exchange is a thing, if you can find an exchange participant willing to offer it to you.
Yes, but the question is, is transit over exchange better/cheaper than buying a crossconnect? Worst case you've just introduced another dependency that costs money and adds complexity. If you're on an IXP, you're already somehow in a data centre anyway… that will have been the hard part in most cases…
> question is, is transit over exchange better/cheaper
Better? No, almost never. Cheaper? Sometimes, especially in DCs that charge ridiculous MRCs for cross-connects. For a small/personal ASN, it can be the right choice.
Hi! I am the presenter. It is true that we have a lot of active peering. In Nikhef alone there are at least 3 IXPs one can join for free (with 10G ports!). AMS-IX makes that 4 with their Bright Networks Club [1]. This can set you up with a lot of peering at basically no cost.
If you can't get into Nikhef, you can become a member of Coloclue. One of their data centers has Frys-IX indoors, and members can get an XC there.
Uh, Switzerland is one of the best locations to do this in, due to the government fibre build-out mandate. However, you have to start a little larger than "minimum" ISP size in other countries to be able to take advantage of it.
Peering… really depends on where you are, it hasn't been a problem for us.
That said, Init7 is, for the time being, still a scaled-up mini ISP. They're slowly devolving into corporate-dom, but not there yet.
I’m interested to hear more about Init7 becoming more corporate, is that just by virtue of growth and having to adapt to the complexity of being a larger org? Or something else?
It's just market pressure to make/keep things cheap (= "optimising" support), and also with becoming larger it's harder to reach the 'tech nerds' as normal customer if you don't have another social connection to them.
I don't know anything about init7 but there was a talk at WHY2025 about XS4ALL in the Netherlands, and the reasons they let it become corporate boiled down to "we didn't understand how vicious capitalism was and we let the corporation win" (although they still don't realize that, and phrase it more like "there was a difference of values")
