Before we talk about Google Peering, Google owns the smartphone market and this has led to the popularity of all of its services such as Google Drive, Youtube, Play Store, etc. Since we spend significant time on these services it would be really great if we could get uninterrupted speeds on these web services. I have a 3 Mbps (Now in the year 2020, it is 300 Mbps) connection at my home but I enjoy extremely fast internet speed on all Google services including drive, Youtube, Photos, Play store, etc.
To give you a perspective, I usually play Youtube on 1080p and it never stops for buffering. That’s not it. I have around 5-6 devices that play 1080p almost all day together and it still doesn’t buffer. I always enjoy smooth playbacks.
Also, here is a snapshot of my download speed from Google Drive.
So how is all of this possible? The answer is simple Google Peering. Let’s have a look at what it is and why is it providing me with ridiculous speeds.
What is Google Peering?
Google Peering is the technique in which Google establishes a direct connection with an ISP(Internet Service Provider) to provide faster access to its servers. To give you a perspective this is how normally internet works.
You send a request to your ISP who forwards it to the traffic handler, these traffic handlers have laid down connections with other traffic handlers from the other parts of the world. They then connect to the server’s ISP who in turn connects us with the server. That is a very long process.
And when someone peers their network this happens.
The ISP directly creates a connection with Google’s Servers eliminating the need for traffic handlers. This results in really fast request response from Google’s servers.
How is it possible? Isn’t it costly?
The company involved here is Google. They have billions of dollars with them and they’ve put it to use here. They want their services to reach everyone at a better speed than their competitors. Hence, peering with Google is completely free. All your ISP must do is to lay down a network line up to the point where Google has its servers set up and apart from existing major cities Google is laying down its network in smaller cities too.
Do we really need it?
Just like Google one may want to have a peering with Steam or Microsoft or Amazon for that matter. So you might be thinking if we really should take the hassle of peering with just Google as later peering with other would require us to lay down similar networks again.
The simple answer would be that as an ISP you want to give people the services that they want. Today Everyone Spends a lot of time on Youtube, people sync all their photos on Google Photos because it is free.
Google holds android and Billions of Apps are installed by users. All of this happens on Google’s servers and if you could provide your users better access to these services by simply setting up a peer network with Google it might just be totally worth it.
Conclusion
Google peering is an amazing technique to speed up your internet with All of Google’s services. You can get buffer-free youtube, High-speed Google Drive Downloads, High-speed Photos sync, and lightning-fast App installs from the play store. It is the need of the hour and most ISP’s have opted for it. Think about it. You are definitely using Youtube if not anything else. You could get a buffer-less playback on Youtube if your ISP had google peering. So maybe it’s time to ask your ISP to get it.
