Does everyone agree with this, it's the only response I have received thus far (and according to the list, the sender works for a tier 1 provider).
[snip]
Tier 1: _Owns the fiber_, Multiple coast to coast paths of significant bandwidth
Of the large national network service providers, few actually own their own fiber. Sprint and MCI do; UUnet was bought by someone that does, PSI doesn't, AGIS doesn't, BBN doesn't, ANS doesn't. Netcom, CRL, Genunity, Verio, Exodus, Internex, and the like don't. Given that there are at least 6 major backbone providers by anyone's standards and probably more like 20, and that only 4-5 companies own the fiber, obviously there's a mismatch there. The number of companies with DS-3 backbones to 3 widely seperated interexchange points (the previous "Tier 1" definition") now is very close to 50. Owning fiber is probably not applicable. -george william herbert gherbert@crl.com