Lots of things that move traffic to/from AS15169 (Google) through peering via routeservers at major IXes aren't direct peers of it.

https://bgp.he.net/AS15169

One thing that is not immediately apparent from looking at BGP tables and peering relationships is the business relationship between various ASes. Which can be entirely opaque. Obviously they have a lot going on with Hurricane as a primary upstream transit provider. How much money is involved we have no idea, and we also have no idea what kind of "special" relationship the Google Fiber people have going on behind the scenes with Hurricane.

Also Google Fiber is a few isolated pockets of connectivity in the cities it serves, it's not actually that big as compared to the scale of a huge residential last mile ISP like Comcast, Shaw, Centurylink, RCN, Charter/Spectrum, etc.

Rather than the HE BGP analysis page a better point of view to get an idea of google fiber's IX point presences, etc, would be peeringdb.

https://www.peeringdb.com/net/5063

It should also be noted that google fiber also now owns Webpass through acquisition, which is its own pre-existing AS

https://www.peeringdb.com/net/19

Neither Google Fiber nor Google is a transit provider. Even if Google was peering with them, neither AS would propagate these BGP routes to the rest of the internet. These routes would then not appear on he.net.

Why would only transit providers show up in the aspath? If they are peering then the peer for one would be advertised as the penultimate if the other right? Unless they advertise each others' prefixes

I don't know how BGP works in detail, but I have to wonder how HE would be able to observe peering between Google Fiber (AS16591) and Google (AS15169). Google Fiber won't carry third-party traffic through AS16591 to AS15169, and vice versa, so I wouldn't expect either AS to announce routes that would expose the peering. But they are definitely peered, as confirmed by a simple traceroute.

So I wonder why HE can see some peering relationships but not others. Some of the listed peers are exactly what you'd expect (SoftLayer, Digital Ocean, Wikimedia) while others are weird (Fortinet, City of North Kansas City??).

Because people give them bgp tables to get better stats on websites like bgp.he.net, I (bgp.tools) have to do the same thing, see list: https://bgp.tools/credits

The ASpath in sh bgp route would show

As a few folks here have already pointed out, publicly available peering information does not tell the whole story. Read https://storage.googleapis.com/fiber/peering/GoogleFiberPeer... and understand what:

    Alongside AS16591, Google Fiber may reannounce prefixes from the following on-net ASNs:
    ● AS19448
    ● AS-GOOGLE-IT
    ● AS6432
    ● AS19165
    The AS-GOOGLE-FIBER aut-num object in RADb contains the most current list of ASNs.

means to grok the situation.

Do you get to pick your AS number when registering a new one? It can’t be a coincidence that google is AS15169 and google fiber is AS16591, an anagram of googles AS.

Is this an "Ask HN"?

(If anyone is reading this in the future, the current title is "Why Isn't Google Fiber Peered with Google")