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Is physical location or peering more important for speed?
If you have the option to choose between a provider that has servers in your city but no direct peering with major ISPs (peering with provider 2, though) vs a provider that's 150km away but has direct peering with the 3 major ISPs, which would you choose for performance? Assuming every access to the website would be from the physical location of provider 1 (max 5km radius)
Comments
This issue is common where I live (and our main office is). Almost every single provider will peer and/or backhaul all traffic approx 300mi away to Seattle, WA. Unfortunately, a lot of ISPs just won't even bother peering outside of a major IX.
It would probably come down to specifics like what physical path are they taking (if a different one) and how congested their peering ports/links are, etc. I would assume either way all your traffic has to transit 150km away to provider 2 anyways (and then onto their peering), so it is probably better to go to the provider that peers in-house rather than rely on a provider that is 2 degrees of separation away assuming all else is equal. That is if I understood correctly and your ISP (or all local ISPs) only peer with provider 2 and you are talking about performance originated on said ISPs from physical location of provider 1
Unless your application is very latency sensitive I would say peering. Especially if that means they have more redundancy in their peering arrangements (multiple physical connectivity rather than most/all that peering happening down a potential single-point-of-failure). As well as being better for reliability if you are looking at that over speed, better physical layer redundancy increases the change they'll be able to maintain the speed during a fault situation with them or one of their peering partners.
Yes, exactly, all major ISPs peer with provider 2 in the capital but all customers are in the small city where provider 1, which doesn't peer with with any ISPs, is.
Thanks!