Due to increase of domestic Internet traffic within the country, market demand for local peering service was generated considerably. Under the then prevailing arrangements, the PIE customers accessing domestic web servers or e-mail servers had to pay the same charges which they were paying for international access. The PIE tariff included the rental for both international as well as domestic connectivity. There is was peering arrangement available for the exchange of domestic traffic. Due to increase in the domestic IP traffic, a pressing demand from the PIE customers, i.e., ISPs and the IT industry for providing peering facility for exchange of domestic IP traffic at lower tariff was submitted to Ministry of IT & Telecom and PTCL. At that time the domestic traffic on PIE was about 2% of the total traffic and had an upward trend. Furthermore a bulk of e-mail and web traffic of the large ISPs was routed locally without utilizing international links of PIE. Provisioning of peering arrangements was to facilitate these customers to exchange such domestic traffic on economical rates. PTCL approved the policy for Peering Bandwidth links in 2003.
