This April, NetActuate’s Director of Global Networking, Kate Gerry, attended the 14th meeting of the Global Peering Forum (GPF), a yearly networking event that promotes interconnection among networks, content, cloud, and digital media organizations and related entities.
NetActuate was excited to connect face-to-face with the peering partners and vendors that help us provide optimized, low latency network services across the world. GPF is a meeting-focused conference that brings peers together to interact with other networks to discuss new arrangements, as well as expansion opportunities with existing partners. This has allowed us to work with both colocation and transit providers to address concerns and improve our network footprint and performance.
The first and last days of GPF were dedicated to meetings, with a short 30-minute break in the middle of the day. On the second day, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority’s CTO spoke regarding the difficulty of keeping Canadian internet traffic within Canada, and how the majority of their Canadian traffic is actually routed through Ashburn, Virginia. Another notable discussion was from Martin Levy, Distinguished Engineer at Cloudflare, discussing the viability of remote peering fabrics and if they are really improving connectivity.
GPF also included a talk about how Brexit may affect peering within Europe, and how it may affect the network operator community as well. Telegeography and Angola Cables each had talks on submarine cable systems. They shared how their design is being driven by content providers, and spoke about the challenges and opportunities presented by creating the first cable system directly connecting South America and Africa
Through this conference, NetActuate was able to negotiate additional peering in multiple regions. With the new peers, we are now able to drive our average latency in certain regions even lower, and improve the performance of our anycast delivery platform with a greater global presence. NetActuate now has the 4th largest global network by peers, as measured by the Hurricane Electric BGP toolkit.