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Internet transit is the service of allowing network traffic to cross or "transit" a computer network, usually used to connect a smaller 
In the 1970s and early 1980s-era Internet, the assumption was made that all networks would provide full transit for one another. In the modern private-sector Internet, two forms of
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...
(ISP) to the larger Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
. Technically, it consists of two bundled services:
* The advertisement of customer routes
Route or routes may refer to:
* Route (gridiron football), a path run by a wide receiver
* route (command), a program used to configure the routing table
* Route, County Antrim, an area in Northern Ireland
* ''The Route'', a 2013 Ugandan film
* Ro ...
to other ISPs, thereby soliciting inbound traffic toward the customer from them
* The advertisement of other ISPs' routes (usually but not necessarily in the form of a default route
In computer networking, the default route is a configuration of the Internet Protocol (IP) that establishes a forwarding rule for packets when no specific address of a next-hop host is available from the routing table or other routing mechanisms ...
or a full set of routes to all of the destinations on the Internet) to the ISP's customer, thereby soliciting outbound traffic from the customer towards these networks.
In the 1970s and early 1980s-era Internet, the assumption was made that all networks would provide full transit for one another. In the modern private-sector Internet, two forms of interconnect agreement
An interconnect agreement is a business contract between telecommunications organizations for the purpose of interconnecting their networks and exchanging telecommunications traffic. Interconnect agreements are found both in the public switched tel ...
s exist between Internet networks: transit, and peering
In computer networking, peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the "down-stream" users of each network. Peering is settlement-free, also known as "bill-and ...
. Transit is distinct from peering, in which only traffic between the two ISPs and their downstream customers is exchanged and neither ISP can see upstream
Upstream may refer to:
* Upstream (bioprocess)
* ''Upstream'' (film), a 1927 film by John Ford
* Upstream (networking)
* ''Upstream'' (newspaper), a newspaper covering the oil and gas industry
* Upstream (petroleum industry)
* Upstream (software ...
routes over the peering connection. A transit free network uses only peering; a network that uses only unpaid peering and connects to the whole Internet is considered a Tier 1 network. In the 1990s, the network access point
Internet exchange points (IXes or IXPs) are common grounds of IP networking, allowing participant Internet service providers (ISPs) to exchange data destined for their respective networks. IXPs are generally located at places with preexisting ...
concept provided one form of transit.
Pricing for the internet transit varies at different times and geographical locations. The transit service is typically priced per megabit per second per month, and customers are often required to commit to a minimum volume of bandwidth, and usually to a minimum term of service as well, usually using a 95e percentile burstable billing scheme. Some transit agreements provide " service-level agreements" which purport to offer money-back guarantees of performance between the customer's Internet connection and specific points on the Internet, typically major Internet exchange points within a continental geography such as North America. These service level agreements still provide only best-effort delivery since they do not guarantee service the other half of the way, from the Internet exchange point to the final destination.
See also
* Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) *Federal Internet Exchange
Federal Internet Exchange (FIX) points were policy-based network peering points where U.S. federal agency networks, such as the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), NASA Science Network (NSN), Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), and MILNET ...
(FIX)
* Internet exchange point (IXP)
References
Internet architecture {{Internet-stub