IP transit is a service where an upstream carrier (or multiple carriers) forwards your AS’s traffic to the rest of the internet and returns inbound traffic back to you. If you’re asking what is IP transit, it’s the commercial pathway to “reach everyone” on the internet using BGP to exchange routes and policy.
We often see network teams buy transit at data centers or IX locations to guarantee reachability, performance, and resilience for SaaS, content, and enterprise networks. The details matter—route quality, latency, and diversity determine user experience as much as raw bandwidth.
Key considerations include:
- BGP & routes: Full/partial tables, filtering, and communities for traffic engineering.
- Capacity & commits: Port speed vs. committed data rate; burst policies.
- Billing & SLAs: 95th-percentile billing, latency/jitter targets, packet-loss guarantees.
- Resilience: Multi-homing, diverse paths, and smart routing to avoid single points of failure.
- Security add-ons: DDoS mitigation, RPKI validation, and IRR-based filtering.
Our take? Treat IP transit as a performance product, not a commodity—engineer for reach, resilience, and control.
Designing for global reach with real-world uptime? Explore our IP Transit Guide to compare carriers, tune BGP policy (communities, prepends), and build a multi-homed edge that delivers speed, stability, and clean routing at scale.
