How to choose an IP transit provider

Choosing an IP transit provider means evaluating a handful of measurable criteria: peering depth, latency and route quality, SLA terms, DDoS protection and the billing model. A transit provider advertises a full BGP table or a default route to you and commits to deliver your traffic to any destination on the internet, so its topology and policy directly shape how your users experience the network. Base the decision on data from PeeringDB, looking glass and testing rather than on marketing claims.

Peering depth and capacity

Check how many peering sessions the provider holds, at which IXPs, and how much traffic it exchanges directly instead of buying it from its own upstreams. The deeper its peering in your region, the shorter the AS-path to key networks and the less it depends on higher-tier transit. A PeeringDB profile shows exchange presence, policies and port capacity. Valid IRR and ROA (RPKI) records confirm that the provider manages prefixes correctly.

• Number and location of IXPs and private peerings (PNI) in your region.
• PeeringDB profile: peering policy, traffic levels, exchange presence.
• MANRS compliance and route filtering based on IRR and RPKI (ROA).
• Access port capacity (1G, 10G, 100G) and burst headroom.
• How many upstreams the provider runs and its resilience to failure.

Latency, routing and transparency

Latency and route stability matter more than headline bandwidth alone. Use the provider's looking glass to inspect the AS-path to common destinations, and run traceroutes to measure delay and congestion points during peak hours. Note whether the provider exposes BGP communities (blackhole, local-preference steering and prepend) that let you engineer traffic. Good transit gives symmetric, short paths to Polish and European networks with predictable jitter.

SLA, DDoS protection and support

An SLA should state availability (for example 99.9 percent per month, roughly 43 minutes of downtime), guaranteed backbone latency and packet loss, and NOC response times backed by service credits. Confirm whether DDoS protection is built into the transit or sold as an add-on, and which mechanisms it covers: RTBH (RFC 5635), FlowSpec (RFC 8955) and volumetric scrubbing. A 24/7 NOC that speaks your language and knows the regional topology also counts.

Billing model and contract terms

The most common model is 95th percentile: the provider discards the top 5 percent of traffic samples (usually taken every 5 minutes over a month) and bills the remaining peak in Mbps. Alternatives are a flat fee for a port of a given size in Gbps, or a commit-plus-burst model with a minimum commitment. Compare unit price, contract length, overage fees, port and cross-connect costs, and whether IPv4 and IPv6 traffic is billed together. Running two providers (multihoming) improves resilience and gives you negotiating leverage.

IP transit at AS202520 SkyPass

AS202520 SkyPass delivers IP transit and BGP from PoPs in Warsaw and Wrocław, peering at Polish IXPs: THINX, TPIX, WRIX and 1-IX. You can verify routes and AS-paths before signing in our looking glass, and we bill IPv4 and IPv6 traffic on a 95th-percentile basis. We pair transit with RTBH- and FlowSpec-based DDoS protection and remote IXP access, so operators shorten paths and cut costs without building their own presence at every exchange.