Re: Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)
On 5/4/06, Aaron Glenn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 5/4/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: why would anyone do that? --bill Some companies feel entitled to charging more for their routes than they would for simple transit. aaron.glenn John: Hopefully this comes out clearly, as writing can be more confusing than speaking... Are you getting at Inter AS /SLA/QOS that you would get from transit vs. best effort peering? Even that has some issues, the one that jumps out to me is hopefully clearly stick figure-diagrammed below: AS#x $--SLA--Transit ok... But... AS#x $--SLA--Transit -(second hop)--Customers/Peers---No Qos/SLA--- My point is it is hard to do anything beyond the first AS# for any SLA that you would be paying, since after that the packet switches to no money packets on a paid connection, pushing out the issue for things sent down that pipe... Peter Cohen
Re: Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)
On 5/4/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] karoshi.com wrote: why would anyone do that? Hopefully this comes out clearly, as writing can be more confusing than speaking... My point is it is hard to do anything beyond the first AS# for any SLA that you would be paying, since after that the packet switches to no money packets on a paid connection, pushing out the issue for things sent down that pipe... Are you saying that there *IS* a good reason why anyone would buy paid transit from all SFP providers? And that the reason is so that you have a contractual SLA with all of those providers? If so then two questions come to mind. Couldn't you achieve the same thing by having paid peering with the SFP providers? Assuming that you do have contractual service with all of the SFP providers and that there is an SLA in all of those contracts, how do you deal with the fact that there is no SLA (to you) on packets which leave the set of SFP networks? Packets could leave by going to a transit customer of an SFP network or by going to a non-SFP peer of an SFP network. Quite frankly, while terminology like transit, settlement free peering and paid peering are useful to analyze and talk about network topography, I don't think they are useful by themselves when making purchase decisions. They need to be backed up with some hard technical data about the network in question as well as the contractual terms (transit or peering) in place. It is not possible to say that a given network architecture is BETTER if you only know the transit/peering arrangements between that network and some subset of the other network operators. SFP operators will always be a subset of the entire public Internet. Membership in that set changes from time to time for various reasons. And the importance of non-members also varies from time to time, especially content-provider networks. --Michael Dillon P.S. I purposely did not use the term tier because I do not believe that current usage of this term refers to network architecture. It has more to do with market dominance than anything else and even there it is relative because there is no longer a single Internet access market.
Re: Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)
On 5/5/06, Peter Cohen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hopefully this comes out clearly, as writing can be more confusing than speaking... Are you getting at Inter AS /SLA/QOS that you would get from transit vs. best effort peering? Even that has some issues, the one that jumps out to me is hopefully clearly stick figure-diagrammed below: AS#x $--SLA--Transit ok... But... AS#x $--SLA--Transit -(second hop)--Customers/Peers---No Qos/SLA--- My point is it is hard to do anything beyond the first AS# for any SLA that you would be paying, You can't *guarantee* better service once the packet leaves your provider's upstream ASs. However, there are hardware-appliance and connectivity vendors who make it their job to come very close, as long as the far-end network has at least one good, near-end reachable path. That's where the concept of route control (where BGP, with all the modern weighting frills, is not the final arbiter of route decisions) comes into play. Extending that concept, if *both* ends have some sort of route control in place, via the same vendor or not, you're even more likely to get good service quality even if the SFI providers in the middle suck at any given time. (ObAdvertisingSquelch: I have direct involvement in this subject, so I won't discuss vendor names on-list to avoid conflict of interest.) -- -- Todd Vierling [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)
At 07:48 AM 5/5/2006, Peter Cohen wrote: On 5/4/06, Aaron Glenn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 5/4/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: why would anyone do that? --bill Some companies feel entitled to charging more for their routes than they would for simple transit. aaron.glenn John: Hopefully this comes out clearly, as writing can be more confusing than speaking... Are you getting at Inter AS /SLA/QOS that you would get from transit vs. best effort peering? Even that has some issues, the one that jumps out to me is hopefully clearly stick figure-diagrammed below: AS#x $--SLA--Transit ok... But... AS#x $--SLA--Transit -(second hop)--Customers/Peers---No Qos/SLA--- My point is it is hard to do anything beyond the first AS# for any SLA that you would be paying, since after that the packet switches to no money packets on a paid connection, pushing out the issue for things sent down that pipe... Peter Cohen It was not about the SLA, although in theory, buying transit should give the provider more incentive to help. The off-list discussion was more about avoiding the dependency problem of peerings. A good peering involves multiple points of geographically diverse interconnections. The number and location of these interconnections would depend on the unique combination of architectures of the two peers. If an AS does not have the traffic levels to justify multiple connections into a neighboring AS, relying on a single interconnection point is a problem. Even if the interconnection does not go down, it might not be a good way to reach particular networks in the other AS. Instead, it might be wiser to tune traffic via a different neighbor using transit. In other words, it gives you the best of both worlds. Most traffic travels directly to/from the SFP provider that serves the corresponding networks (like a peer). However, one can use the transit option at will for particular routes. And, one can use transit via the other SFPs should any transit to an SFP fail (fiber cut, etc.) Given that transit is pretty cheap, it seems more cost effective, at lower traffic levels, to purchase single transit interconnections to all the SFPs than attempt true peering at a much larger number of interconnections to those same SFPs. This is getting pretty theoretical, but I was curious if such a business model was attempted. The original SAVVIS did this in part long ago, but to just three neighbors. (I think they are now part of CW now...I can't keep track of all these mergers.) It sounds like Internap is pretty close to this model, although I don't believe they have transit to all nine (if my SFP count is correct). John
Re: Tier 2 - Lease?
to underline a point made previously though: Tier-1 is a routing architecture term that doesn't have any useful direct bearing in how best to select a service provider. some of the best service providers in the world are not tier-1 and some of the worst are ( i won't name members of either camp.). The meaning of tier 1 is not static. At one time it referred to providers with more-or-less national coverage who more-or-less owned their own facilities. Somewhere along the line, buyers decided that peering was an important factor in buying decisions and tier 1 came to mean companies who do not have blackholes because of lack of peering. Routing engineers interpreted this to mean companies with settlement-free interconnect since at the time, transit was seen as an inferior way to get connectivity. In today's world where latency and packet loss figures are more important to buying decisions, I suspect that tier 1 refers to companies who run good networks with no visible technical issues. In any case, tier 1 is a marketing term that refers to the ranking of companies in terms of prefeability. Those companies whose services are highly preferred are in the TOP TIER of the ranking. After that there is a SECOND TIER which is good if you can't afford the top tier. There have always been people who made their buying decisions based on the NET EFFECT OF SEVERAL PROVIDERS rather than simply evaluating a provider standing alone. It is possible to buy service from two or three second tier providers and get BETTER THAN TIER 1 service. Mindless rankings and classification systems are not much help in making intelligent buying decisions. I really don't understand why people on this list care so much about marleting terminology. --Michael Dillon
Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)
From an off-list discussion: Does anyone know of an ISP that has paid transit from all known SFP (Tier 1) providers? (sort of the old SAVVIS model on steroids.) John
Re: Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)
On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 11:25:35AM -0500, John Dupuy wrote: From an off-list discussion: Does anyone know of an ISP that has paid transit from all known SFP (Tier 1) providers? (sort of the old SAVVIS model on steroids.) John why would anyone do that? --bill
Re: Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)
Internap?[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 11:25:35AM -0500, John Dupuy wrote: From an off-list discussion: Does anyone know of an ISP that has paid transit from all known SFP (Tier 1) providers? (sort of the old SAVVIS model on steroids.) John why would anyone do that?--bill Love cheap thrills? Enjoy PC-to-Phone calls to 30+ countries for just 2¢/min with Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.
Re: Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)
Internap?[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 11:25:35AM -0500, John Dupuy wrote: From an off-list discussion: Does anyone know of an ISP that has paid transit from all known SFP (Tier 1) providers? (sort of the old SAVVIS model on steroids.) John why would anyone do that?--bill How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messengers low PC-to-Phone call rates.
Re: Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)
At 12:57 PM 5/4/2006, Jon Lyons wrote: Internap? Yes. That's what I was thinking, but too easy? -M -- Martin Hannigan(c) 617-388-2663 Renesys Corporation(w) 617-395-8574 Member of Technical Staff Network Operations [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)
Well, I suppose that depends on what you mean by Tier 1. ;-) We do buy from a number of providers, many of which would be considered Tier 1 by many people. On Thu, 4 May 2006, Jon Lyons wrote: Internap? [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 11:25:35AM -0500, John Dupuy wrote: From an off-list discussion: Does anyone know of an ISP that has paid transit from all known SFP (Tier 1) providers? (sort of the old SAVVIS model on steroids.) John why would anyone do that? --bill - Love cheap thrills? Enjoy PC-to-Phone calls to 30+ countries for just 2¢/min with Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. -- Brandon Ross AIM: BrandonNRoss Director, Network Engineering ICQ: 2269442 Internap Skype: brandonross Yahoo: BrandonNRoss
Re: Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)
On 5/4/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: why would anyone do that? --bill Some companies feel entitled to charging more for their routes than they would for simple transit. aaron.glenn
Re: Tier 2 - Lease?
Sorry... I should have clarified, I wasn't thinking it had anything to do w/ fiber or no fiber... that was just a secondary question. Rob Richard A Steenbergen wrote: On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:22PM -0700, Robert Sherrard wrote: What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider... Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from? It has absolutely nothing to do with fiber. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_carrier As of this exact moment that I'm posting, that article is actually reasonably accurate. Of course I'm sure in 5 minutes 100 people will be updating it to include their favorite not-really-a-tier-1 carrier. :)
Re: Tier 2 - Lease?
On Tue, 02 May 2006 22:38:22 PDT, Robert Sherrard said: What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider... Usually it's defined as Tier 1's don't buy transit, Tier 2's do. Of course, it gets a lot more complicated, because you can easily have a Tier2 that's peering for 95% of its prefixes, and buying transit for 5% of not-often-used prefixes simply because it's expensive to get a peer for that 5%. But said Tier2 may be bigger than some tier 1s, and be better on any *rational* comparison criteria (price, support, throughput, latency, jitter, downtime/SLA, path diversity, etc) If a company is almost a Tier1, but buys transit for several hundred prefixes coming from Korea and Nigeria (say, 0.2% out of the 180K or whatever the routing table is this week), why do you *care*, unless you have (or *seriously* plan to have) lots of packets coming and going to those 2 countries? In general, the people who *really* care about Tier 1/2 already know if they are a 1 or a 2 themselves. Almost everybody else falls into 2 categories: 1) People who are using 1/2 as a shortcut for doing a *proper* analysis of the options. 2) People who feel a marketing need to say we peer with X Tier-1s. (OK, where's my asbestos long-johns? ;) Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from? Try asking? :) (And the answer will probably depend on which exact leg of their network you're asking about - it's almost certainly a patchwork) It probably doesn't matter unless you're trying to buy connectivity over diverse paths - in which case you're going to have to ask *both* providers what the exact fiber routing is. It's possible the tier2 and the tier1 are both leasing previously-dark fiber in the same conduit - but leasing it from 2 different companies. And of course, it's quite possible that *this* week, that tier 2 is routing your packets over fiber they own, and next week, some traffic engineering puts your packets on fiber leased from A - and last week, it was on fiber leased from B. (Disclaimer: we're neither a Tier 1 or 2. And most of the routes we receive via a regional provider that treats us *very* nicely - mostly because we have them by the short-and-curlies. They piss us off too much, we turn off the phones in their NOC. ;) pgpyJQhOQycIm.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Tier 2 - Lease?
(Disclaimer: we're neither a Tier 1 or 2. And most of the routes we receive via a regional provider that treats us *very* nicely - mostly because we have them by the short-and-curlies. They piss us off too much, we turn off the phones in their NOC. ;) er... a typo? should be... ... we turn ON the phones in their NOC. --bill
Re: Tier 2 - Lease?
On Wed, 03 May 2006 06:32:24 -, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: er... a typo? should be... ... we turn ON the phones in their NOC. No, turning the phones *on* is what you do to their help desk. :) Turning off the phones shouldn't inconvenience a NOC that much, since most of the people there probably have cell phones too. It mostly serves as a reminder that their HVAC and electrical feeds are equally under our control. ;) (No, we've never actually had to do it, and the actual business relationship is a *lot* more complicated than that - at one point, looking at the paperwork it wasn't clear if we were buying bandwidth from ourselves, or if we were a *re*seller of our bandwidth to ourselves. ;) pgpvUa8QOgbib.pgp Description: PGP signature
RE: Tier 2 - Lease?
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider... This has been answered by Richard, but to put my two cents in - you shouldn't care. There is very little correlation between performance, support quality, or footprint and tier status. That's one reason folks like Vijay Gill have been trying to get people to use more precise terms like Settlement Free Interconnection (e.g. Verizon Business is completely SFI) rather than Tier 1. Also, many companies (or their sales staffs) aren't truthful about their status, or make misrepresentations about what their status means. The list of extremely large and important non-Tier 1 carriers is long - look at DTAG, for instance, or Singtel. Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from? Rob Cogent, for example, is a Tier 2, but that's not a good reason to either buy or not buy transit from them. There ARE good reasons (both ways) but that's not one of them. Daniel Golding
Re: Tier 2 - Lease?
At 01:58 AM 5/3/2006, Richard A Steenbergen wrote: On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:22PM -0700, Robert Sherrard wrote: What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider... Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from? It has absolutely nothing to do with fiber. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_carrier As of this exact moment that I'm posting, that article is actually reasonably accurate. Of course I'm sure in 5 minutes 100 people will be updating it to include their favorite not-really-a-tier-1 carrier. :) Someone added Cogent as a Tier 1, and there are others missing so I'd ignore the who is a tier 1 portion. -M -- Martin Hannigan(c) 617-388-2663 Renesys Corporation(w) 617-395-8574 Member of Technical Staff Network Operations [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Tier 2 - Lease?
Interesting to notice someone (perhaps from this list?) has removed Cogent from the T1 list. They did however leave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogent alone. -Scott -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Martin Hannigan Sent: Wednesday, May 03, 2006 10:07 AM To: Richard A Steenbergen; Robert Sherrard Cc: nanog list Subject: Re: Tier 2 - Lease? At 01:58 AM 5/3/2006, Richard A Steenbergen wrote: On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:22PM -0700, Robert Sherrard wrote: What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider... Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from? It has absolutely nothing to do with fiber. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_carrier As of this exact moment that I'm posting, that article is actually reasonably accurate. Of course I'm sure in 5 minutes 100 people will be updating it to include their favorite not-really-a-tier-1 carrier. :) Someone added Cogent as a Tier 1, and there are others missing so I'd ignore the who is a tier 1 portion. -M -- Martin Hannigan(c) 617-388-2663 Renesys Corporation(w) 617-395-8574 Member of Technical Staff Network Operations [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tier 2 - Lease?
On Wed, 03 May 2006 07:47:20 PDT, Berkman, Scott said: Interesting to notice someone (perhaps from this list?) has removed Cogent from the T1 list. Wishful thinking from somebody carrying a grudge at Level3? (ducks) :) pgpmzdStuyLs6.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Tier 2 - Lease?
so annoying. people keep trying to add several non-tier-1 providers in there. cogent 174 : no. buys transit from 2914 (NTT america/verio) btn 3491 : no. buys from savvis 3561 i believe ft 5511 : no. buys from sprint 1239 i'm pretty sure i saw some other silly ones in there, too, but i can't remember what they are at this point. the annoying cogent edits are coming from 72.66.2.5 (pool-72-66-2-5.washdc.fios.verizon.net), and they're persistent, so as is the normal case with wikipedia, the most fanatical person wins and the truth is hopefully somewhere near by. hopefully this person will soon tire. for the moment, the list looks mostly or completely correct. to underline a point made previously though: Tier-1 is a routing architecture term that doesn't have any useful direct bearing in how best to select a service provider. some of the best service providers in the world are not tier-1 and some of the worst are ( i won't name members of either camp.). t. On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 10:06:52AM -0400, Martin Hannigan wrote: At 01:58 AM 5/3/2006, Richard A Steenbergen wrote: On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:22PM -0700, Robert Sherrard wrote: What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider... Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from? It has absolutely nothing to do with fiber. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_carrier As of this exact moment that I'm posting, that article is actually reasonably accurate. Of course I'm sure in 5 minutes 100 people will be updating it to include their favorite not-really-a-tier-1 carrier. :) Someone added Cogent as a Tier 1, and there are others missing so I'd ignore the who is a tier 1 portion. -M -- Martin Hannigan(c) 617-388-2663 Renesys Corporation(w) 617-395-8574 Member of Technical Staff Network Operations [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- _ todd underwood +1 603 643 9300 x101 renesys corporationchief of operations security [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.renesys.com/blog/todd.shtml
Re: Tier 2 - Lease?
On May 3, 2006, at 11:41 AM, Todd Underwood wrote: to underline a point made previously though: Tier-1 is a routing architecture term that doesn't have any useful direct bearing in how best to select a service provider. s/routing architecture/business/ It is possible to be a Tier Two provider and use communities route-maps to look like a Tier One. You purchase transit, therefore are not tier one, but are unreachable through your transit unless the end point is a downstream of your transit provider. Architecturally, those are identical situations. Different commercial agreements, though. -- TTFN, patrick P.S. How much you wanna bet some of the tier ones are paying other tier ones more for fiber or colo or something than the tier twos.
Re: Tier 2 - Lease?
Robert Sherrard wrote: What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider... We are a tier 1 provider = I am a salesperson. They are a tier 2 provider. = I am a salesperson and they are our competitor. Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from? Ask them. They may not tell you (or know, depending on who you are talking to.) -- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Administration - [EMAIL PROTECTED] NetLojix Communications, Inc. - http://www.netlojix.com/ WestNet: Connecting you to the planet. 805 884-6323
Re: Tier 2 - Lease?
The tier nomenclature also a really good way to instigate flame fests on lists such as this. Regards Marshall On May 3, 2006, at 12:23 PM, Joe Provo wrote: On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:22PM -0700, Robert Sherrard wrote: What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider... Marketing. The nomenclature is a completelyy irrelevant hangover of the NSFnet days when people thought in terms of the backbone. If your providers' value is only in specific delicate contractural relationships that can vanish with little notice, is that really a value? You should examine carriers by your needs, performance, scope, reliability [human and network], cost, etc meaningful metrics. Get reference clients and query their technical staff. Get a view into their routing table and examine adjacenies if *you* care about a particular adjacency, press for performace data/trends. Joe -- RSUC / GweepNet / Spunk / FnB / Usenix / SAGE
Re: Tier 2 - Lease?
At 11:31 AM 5/3/2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii *** PGP Signature Status: unknown *** Signer: Unknown, Key ID = 0xB4D3D7B0 *** Signed: 5/3/2006 11:31:44 AM *** Verified: 5/3/2006 2:50:05 PM *** BEGIN PGP VERIFIED MESSAGE *** On Wed, 03 May 2006 07:47:20 PDT, Berkman, Scott said: Interesting to notice someone (perhaps from this list?) has removed Cogent from the T1 list. Wishful thinking from somebody carrying a grudge at Level3? (ducks) :) I removed them for accuracy reasons. http://www.fugawi.net/~hannigan/pirates.jpg And the Wiki discussion, which is probably better at this URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cogent_Communications -- Martin Hannigan(c) 617-388-2663 Renesys Corporation(w) 617-395-8574 Member of Technical Staff Network Operations [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tier 2 - Lease?
On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:22PM -0700, Robert Sherrard wrote: What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider... Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from? It has absolutely nothing to do with fiber. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_carrier As of this exact moment that I'm posting, that article is actually reasonably accurate. Of course I'm sure in 5 minutes 100 people will be updating it to include their favorite not-really-a-tier-1 carrier. :) -- Richard A Steenbergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)
