Why Isn't Google Fiber Peered with Google

Lots of things that move traffic to&#x2F;from AS15169 (Google) through peering via routeservers at major IXes aren&#x27;t direct peers of it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bgp.he.net&#x2F;AS15169" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bgp.he.net&#x2F;AS15169</a><p>One thing that is not immediately apparent from looking at BGP tables and peering relationships is the business relationship between various ASes. Which can be entirely opaque. Obviously they have a lot going on with Hurricane as a primary upstream transit provider. How much money is involved we have no idea, and we also have no idea what kind of &quot;special&quot; relationship the Google Fiber people have going on behind the scenes with Hurricane.<p>Also Google Fiber is a few isolated pockets of connectivity in the cities it serves, it&#x27;s not actually that big as compared to the scale of a huge residential last mile ISP like Comcast, Shaw, Centurylink, RCN, Charter&#x2F;Spectrum, etc.<p>Rather than the HE BGP analysis page a better point of view to get an idea of google fiber&#x27;s IX point presences, etc, would be peeringdb.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.peeringdb.com&#x2F;net&#x2F;5063" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.peeringdb.com&#x2F;net&#x2F;5063</a><p>It should also be noted that google fiber also now owns Webpass through acquisition, which is its own pre-existing AS<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.peeringdb.com&#x2F;net&#x2F;19" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.peeringdb.com&#x2F;net&#x2F;19</a>

Neither Google Fiber nor Google is a transit provider. Even if Google was peering with them, neither AS would propagate these BGP routes to the rest of the internet. These routes would then not appear on he.net.

I don&#x27;t know how BGP works in detail, but I have to wonder how HE would be able to observe peering between Google Fiber (AS16591) and Google (AS15169). Google Fiber won&#x27;t carry third-party traffic through AS16591 to AS15169, and vice versa, so I wouldn&#x27;t expect either AS to announce routes that would expose the peering. But they <i>are</i> definitely peered, as confirmed by a simple traceroute.

As a few folks here have already pointed out, publicly available peering information does not tell the whole story. Read <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.googleapis.com&#x2F;fiber&#x2F;peering&#x2F;GoogleFiberPeeringPolicy.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.googleapis.com&#x2F;fiber&#x2F;peering&#x2F;GoogleFiberPeer...</a> and understand what:<p><pre><code> Alongside AS16591, Google Fiber may reannounce prefixes from the following on-net ASNs: ● AS19448 ● AS-GOOGLE-IT ● AS6432 ● AS19165 The AS-GOOGLE-FIBER aut-num object in RADb contains the most current list of ASNs. </code></pre> means to grok the situation.

Do you get to pick your AS number when registering a new one? It can’t be a coincidence that google is AS15169 and google fiber is AS16591, an anagram of googles AS.

Is this an &quot;Ask HN&quot;?<p>(If anyone is reading this in the future, the current title is &quot;Why Isn&#x27;t Google Fiber Peered with Google&quot;)