Technically, IP transit uses the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to exchange routing information between different Autonomous Systems (AS). A company purchases bandwidth from a larger provider (often Tier-1 or Tier-2) so that the provider “transits” the data traffic. This is crucial for data centers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to ensure complete global connectivity for their end customers.
Security through RPKI provides effective protection against route hijacking by ensuring the reliable origin of routing information. RPKI validates that your prefixes are exclusively advertised by authorized ASNs, thereby preventing unauthorized announcements. Through the “Invalid = Drop” approach, consistent origin validation ensures that hijacked or erroneous routes are systematically rejected—keeping your brand and services accessible at all times. At the same time, the use of RPKI strengthens compliance and trust, as it emphasizes modern routing hygiene and meets industry-standard security requirements.
While both concepts connect networks, they differ fundamentally in their reach and cost model. Read more about this in our article “IP Transit vs. Peering – Differences, Use Cases, and What Really Matters”.
Global internet (all destinations reachable)
Limited to the partner’s network
Paid service (usually based on usage)
Often free of charge (mutual benefit)
Contractual guarantees (SLAs)
“Best-effort” without fixed guarantees
In practice, a cloud provider such as firstcolo uses various ip transit services to ensure that its customers’ hosted servers are accessible worldwide with high performance. For example, when a user from the USA accesses an application hosted in Germany, IP transit ensures that the data packets are efficiently transported via optimized wide area networks. Traffic engineering for route optimization includes the use of Local-Pref internally to define primary and backup paths. Additionally, AS-path prepending is selectively applied to specific upstreams to control data traffic in a targeted manner.
A key quality factor when choosing a transit provider is the “multi-homing” strategy. Here, internet access is realized not through just one, but through multiple independent ip transit service providers. This prevents a “single point of failure”: if one provider fails, the system reroutes traffic via another partner in the shortest possible time, raising network availability to nearly 100 percent.
