> On Aug 2, 2022, at 11:58 AM, Tom Beecher <beec...@beecher.cc> wrote:
>
> This conventional interpretation is the one I'm applying in this question.
>
> I would argue even the 'conventional' definition of 'Tier 1' has been
> nebulous for long enough that it doesn't really matter much anymore.
>
> Who a network connects with and how is all that matters, regardless of what
> label they want to apply to themselves.
Yeah, I would generally agree with this. The interesting thing as I see it is
so much depends of if it’s long-distance or not. If you look at what the
content side generally does (Netflix, Akamai, Fastly, AWS/Cloudfront,
Cloudflare, Yahoo, Edgecast, Apple, etc).. you see that placed close to the
end-users and generally you aren’t going more than a few metros over hopefully.
This generally means you are doing on-ramp to a cloud (Microsoft, Google, AWS,
etc) or get content, or rarely go to something that’s much further away (voice,
etc).
Those places can’t wait for the traditional peering issues to be resolved will
move their traffic to another provider, the day of the traditional SFI/Tier1 is
largely history as the volumes are localized, but that long distance
performance matters as much as ever.
If you are seeing traffic stuck on any particular provider/path you really
should be looking at a regional provider that gives you a good blend vs going
to the big “name brand” places that don’t maintain good local connectivity and
are more likely to trombone your traffic.
I do this for my small ISP, I purchase from two regional providers that roll up
everything nicely so I’m unlikely to have any single outage/issue.
To the other question from Mike, does it matter? Yes, if you are a corporate
place and just go to a national provider because of a national agreement, we
have all seen how this is problematic in the past, and when there is a big
outage, some companies would literally pay that cost for a diverse link.
- Jared
