Why does one house with a cable connection to the Internet have great performance, and the house next to them with a different Internet provider have marginal or potentially poor performance? The answer may lie in the sometimes dark art of Internet peering.

Peter Cohen stopped by to discuss the topic, and try and shed some light on peering recently at the North American Network Operator's Group (NANOG) conference in Philadelphia. Peter has worked in the peering community for more than 12 years, with experience at some of the largest Internet Service Provider networks in the United States, as well as managing peering for Telia-Sonera, the national telecom network of Sweden.

"Peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the customers of each network." Wikipedia