Some people in authority position are giving misleading information to get to through to the average seedbox user. These people are defining peering as it were routing - well, guess what? It's NOT! And now we get people asking "how's your peering?" when they actually mean how their data will be routed for. Peering is an agreement between 2 parties to connect to each other and share traffic, in approximately 1:1 ratio usually.
Let's look at the Wikipedia definitions!
Peering synopsis as follows:
In computer networking, peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the users of each network. The pure definition of peering is settlement-free, "bill-and-keep," or "sender keeps all," meaning that neither party pays the other in association with the exchange of traffic; instead, each derives and retains revenue from its own customers.
Routing synopsis:
Routing is the process of selecting best paths in a network. In the past, the term routing was also used to mean forwarding network traffic among networks. However this latter function is much better described as simply forwarding. Routing is performed for many kinds of networks, including the telephone network (circuit switching), electronic data networks (such as the Internet), and transportation networks. This article is concerned primarily with routing in electronic data networks using packet switching technology.
When people give advice and discuss about this, they get the two confused, even the self-claimed professional and authority figures who might even be in the hosting or networking business!
So in short:
Peering is an agreement between 2 networks to send directly to each other traffic without compensation and thus avoiding transit costs and making the latency lower between the two networks and hence increasing networking quality. These 2 networks need to be geographically meeting in the same location.
Routing is how the packets move in the internet, through which networks a packet routes through to get to the end recipient, finding the shortest and fastest path between these two networks.
