ISP Routing & Peering in 2026: A Research Summary

Summary

The route your traffic takes between networks affects speed and reliability as much as your connection does. This summary looks at how large transit carriers, internet exchanges and content networks interconnect, why BGP route leaks and hijacks still cause outages, and how RPKI is being used to prevent them. It also covers the growing share of traffic that never touches the traditional transit “backbone” because content delivery networks now connect directly to consumer ISPs.

Key Findings

• 1Route leaks and hijacks still happen: misconfigured or malicious BGP announcements continue to cause outages and misrouted traffic, as covered in our explainer on how BGP works.
• 2RPKI adoption is growing but incomplete: more networks sign their routes and filter invalid ones, but networks that don’t validate can still spread bad routes. Current coverage is published on NIST’s RPKI Monitor.
• 3Content moves closer to users: large CDNs and cloud providers peer directly with ISPs and place caches inside ISP networks, so much everyday traffic stays local.

Methodology

This is a summary of public routing data and reporting (see Data Sources), not an original measurement. You can see the path to any host with our traceroute tool and check your connection with our speed test.

Analysis

Congestion and detours between large carriers can add latency and jitter even when every link works. A route leak — when a network wrongly re-announces routes it learned from one provider to another — can pull traffic for thousands of prefixes onto a path that can’t handle it, adding large delays until the leak is withdrawn. RPKI reduces this by letting address holders publish signed Route Origin Authorizations, so validating routers reject announcements from the wrong network. It only helps where networks both sign and validate, which is why industry efforts like MANRS encourage both. Separately, route flap damping can suppress an unstable route for a while to protect routers, which sometimes prolongs an outage after the link recovers. Our guide to reading a traceroute shows how to spot where delay is added.

Industry Insights

Content providers increasingly bypass paid transit by peering at internet exchanges and placing caches inside ISP networks, often under settlement-free agreements. For ISPs this reduces transit costs but shifts investment to local exchange ports and on-net cache space.

Actionable Recommendations

• ✓Multi-home critical services: connect to more than one upstream provider so traffic can move if a carrier has problems.
• ✓Sign and validate with RPKI: publish ROAs for your prefixes and drop RPKI-invalid routes. Check which network announces an IP with an ASN lookup.
• ✓Watch AS paths to key users: long or changing paths are an early sign of routing trouble.
• ✓Use anycast for critical services such as DNS, so users reach the nearest healthy node.
• ✓Join MANRS: adopt the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security to improve filtering and coordination.

Data Sources