Peering Policy

Updated on February 1, 2024
Peering Policy header image

Interconnect with Constant AS20473

This document describes how and where to interconnect with Constant AS20473, including requirements and other factors that may affect how we peer with third parties.

Constant has a selective settlement-free peering policy. Constant will peer with other organizations based on several factors including:

  • Current and anticipated traffic levels between the networks.
  • Number of sites where both peers are present.
  • If there is mutual benefit to proceed with the peering.
  • If the peer complies with our technical and legal requirements.

Constant will review this peering policy periodically and reserves the right to modify this policy at any time.

Constant Peering Information

Peering Process

Peers that would like to establish a settlement-free peering, either private or public, will follow the next process:

  1. Review and agree to this policy, including technical and legal requirements, before contacting AS20473
  2. All peering requests should be sent to peering@constant.com indicating your ASN, places to peer, and, if public peering, including your IP addresses.
  3. Constant analyzes the request.
  4. We evaluate peering requests monthly and answer all the requests with a positive or negative answer.

We will analyze your peering request to determine eligibility for it, and we reserve the right to decline any peering request based on our criteria. We are not required to provide a specific reason to decline a peering request. We also reserve the right to eliminate any established peering at any moment in time.

Technical Requirements

  1. The peer must have a complete and up-to-date entry on PeeringDB.
  2. The peer prefixes must be registered in at least one of the well-known public Internet Routing Registries.
  3. The peer must provide their BGP communities list.
  4. The peer must not advertise our prefixes to transit providers.
  5. The peer must not advertise to us other than own and customer prefixes.
  6. The peer must provide their contact for their 24x7 NOC, which has to be knowledgeable enough to provide technical support for any event that could arise.
  7. The peer must accept that AS20473 will selectively withdraw prefixes from public IXP as needed to protect service quality.
  8. The peer should operate a dual-stack (IPv4 and IPv6) network.
  9. The peer should inform in advance of scheduled maintenance windows.
  10. Peers are encouraged to provide their blackhole communities if available.
  11. Peers are encouraged to implement Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS).
  12. RPKI invalid prefixes will not be accepted.

We do not require contracts or agreements in order to establish a peering session, nor we will enter into one for public peering.

Private Peering Policy

We recommend configuring private peering when traffic between autonomous systems is more than 3 Gbps and have at least two sites in common. The cost of in-building cross-connects will be shared equitably between Constant and the peer. Interface IP addresses will be assigned by both peers in accordance to best common practices. The minimum link speed for private peering interconnections is 10Gbps. Private peering facilities are listed in our PeeringDB entry. Both peers will periodically review bandwidth and upgrade as required.

Public Peering Policy

We peer against route servers (RSs) and send our full local routing table to the RS peers. We usually decline direct peering if the other party is already peering against the RSs but exceptions can be made following our selective peering policy.

Direct IXP peering is taken into consideration if the traffic is interesting for both parties and the other party does not peer against the IXP RSs or if the peer is not sending its full routing table to the RS.