Re: Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)

2006-05-05 Thread John Dupuy


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 
C&W 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 Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)

2006-05-05 Thread Todd Vierling


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?)

2006-05-05 Thread Michael . Dillon

> > 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?)

2006-05-05 Thread Peter Cohen


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?)

2006-05-04 Thread Aaron Glenn


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 Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)

2006-05-04 Thread Brandon Ross

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?)

2006-05-04 Thread Martin Hannigan


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?)

2006-05-04 Thread Jon Lyons
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! Messenger’s low  PC-to-Phone call rates.

Re: Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)

2006-05-04 Thread Jon Lyons
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?)

2006-05-04 Thread bmanning

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


Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)

2006-05-04 Thread John Dupuy


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 2 - Lease?

2006-05-04 Thread Michael . Dillon

> 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




Re: Tier 2 - Lease?

2006-05-03 Thread Martin Hannigan


At 11:31 AM 5/3/2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii


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*** Verified: 5/3/2006 2:50:05 PM
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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?

2006-05-03 Thread Marshall Eubanks


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?

2006-05-03 Thread Jay Hennigan


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


Wikipedia watching (was: Tier 2 - Lease?)

2006-05-03 Thread William Allen Simpson



At 01:58 AM 5/3/2006, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

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


Berkman, Scott wrote:
> 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.
>
Gentlefolk, don't forget that *you* can fix the entries.  For several
years, I and most anybody I know locally here would just fix things
whenever we noticed a silly mistake, without logging on.

Last year, at the urging of some folks in various fields, I finally
added a user name.  However, because of their arcane rules about not
writing articles that are/were based on original work, I cannot
actually help much in my areas of most significant expertise.

I urge you to add a user name, and "watch" some articles.  The amount
of misinformation in some fields, including networking, is astounding.

Now, it's gotten rather large.  When Wikipedia goes down, users call
support.  They have a technical list, but it's hard to help much, as
the supporting documentation has not kept up with installation and
operations.  A problem I'm sure we all recognize!

They are basically holding things together and bailing with both hands.

--
William Allen Simpson
Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32


Re: Tier 2 - Lease?

2006-05-03 Thread Patrick W. Gilmore


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?

2006-05-03 Thread Joe Provo

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?

2006-05-03 Thread Todd Underwood

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?

2006-05-03 Thread Valdis . Kletnieks
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) :)


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Description: PGP signature


RE: Tier 2 - Lease?

2006-05-03 Thread Berkman, Scott

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?

2006-05-03 Thread Martin Hannigan


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?

2006-05-03 Thread Daniel Golding

> -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?

2006-05-03 Thread Valdis . Kletnieks
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. ;)



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Description: PGP signature


Re: Tier 2 - Lease?

2006-05-02 Thread bmanning

> (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?

2006-05-02 Thread Valdis . Kletnieks
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. ;)


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Re: Tier 2 - Lease?

2006-05-02 Thread Robert Sherrard




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?

2006-05-02 Thread Richard A Steenbergen

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)


Tier 2 - Lease?

2006-05-02 Thread Robert Sherrard


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?

Rob