Peering with Packet Clearing House

Packet Clearing House (PCH) is the international organization charged with providing operational support and security to critical Internet infrastructure, including Internet exchange points and the core of the domain name system. In the fulfillment of these responsibilities, we operate public looking-glasses and routing data-collection facilities at approximately a third of the world’s public Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). We also operate the world’s largest anycast DNS network, hosting two of the DNS root letters, and more than 400 top-level domains. While the traffic normally generated by each of these services is small, each provides a unique and necessary service to the Internet infrastructure community and their criticality requires that we provision each with sufficient interconnection bandwidth to protect them against distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks. We make our routing tables available to researchers, the operations community, and the public, in real time at our looking glass site, and as a historical archive, either by request or at our archives. In many locations, PCH provides transit to the Quad9.net open recursive resolver system which is a public service with security and privacy features for users wishing to utilize an external high-performance name-resolution platform.

PCH has an open peering policy, meaning that we will happily interconnect with any other network that operates responsibly and in accord with generally-recognized best practices. Specifically:

Reciprocal Peering Requirements for AS42, AS3856, and AS715

• The destination address of any traffic you send to us must be contained within a route that we currently BGP advertise to you.
• The source address of any traffic you send to us must be contained within a route you currently BGP advertise to us.
• You agree to augment equipment and circuits as necessary to maintain uncongested interconnection paths.
• You agree to maintain a 24x7 NOC with standard technical, administrative, legal, and abuse Points of Contact and provide us with an email address we will use to contact you.
• You agree to respond promptly to communications and work cooperatively to resolve security, stability, and abuse incidents in a timely fashion.
• You agree to BGP advertise only routes to prefixes delegated to you and your customers by a Regional Internet Registry.
• You agree to not engage in practices generally deemed abusive or fraudulent, such as pointing default, rewriting next-hop, or failing to implement BCP-38 filtering.
• In addition, although not mandatory, we prefer that peers that are large enough to meet us in multiple regions do so in at least two locations within each region, and maintain consistent route advertisements and origin ASes within each region.

PCH will happily interconnect with peers of any size over public peering switch fabrics or over private crossconnects at 10gbps or greater.

To arrange peering with us, please open a ticket by emailing peering@pch.net.

As of May 2025, PCH is available for peering at the following 326 Internet Exchange Points: