Peering and Transit advise needed

Hi all, I’m looking for some advise on peering and transit. First of all some info on what we do currently.

We have 2 x routers receiving full routing tables from two separate transit providers. Our routers are iBGP peers and we advertise a single /22 aggregate to both transit providers. Both routers are located in our own facilities and the transit providers drop the service off on Openreach tails.

I’ve been looking into peering at an IX to shift some of our traffic off the transit links. I haven’t had any experience in IX peering and I was looking for some advise or tips on the best way to go about it in the UK. I’m torn between:

1/ putting a router in colo and renting a P2P circuit to connect it back to our network. Maybe even moving one of the transit connections to the colo to reduce the cost of the tails circuit. Peering directly on the IX.

2/ using a service like IX reach to remote peer at an IX and maintain the transit connections in our facilities.

3/ something else that I don’t know is an option yet.

We’re a reasonably smallish network with the closest IX being about 100 miles away as the crow flies.

Appreciate and advise or pointers. I’m proficient enough in BGP configuration to run our network, but I lack any experience of colo or transport networks, aside from renting P2P Ethernet circuits for remote offices.