Tier 1 = Internet backbone providers (United States - AT&T, UUNET, Sprint, AboveNet/Zayo, Cogent, Qwest/CenturyLink, L3/GBLX). However, I might be better served with a Tier 2 for reachability as pointed out in another response. When you say "level of service", what are you referring to? Customer service? Service level agreement (which is pretty much the same across all the Tier 1's)? much appreciated, Eric Louie -----Original Message----- From: Justin M. Streiner [mailto:streiner@cluebyfour.org] Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2013 9:17 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Evaluating Tier 1 Internet providers On Tue, 27 Aug 2013, Eric Louie wrote:
Based on various conversation threads on Nanog I've come up with a few criteria for evaluating Tier 1 providers. I'm open to add other criteria - what would you add to this list? And how would I get a quantitative or qualitative measure of it?
Define "Tier 1 provider". I ask this because it's something that many people don't know what it means, but assume that Tier 1 > Tier !=1.
routing stability
Routeviews.org can shed some light here.
BGP community offerings
If $provider has a page on www.peeringdb.com, they might publish a list of their BGP communities there. Other places to look would be the provider's whois/IRR entries, and on their respective websites, or the sales/marketing folks might be able to get this information for you.
congestion issues
There are various internet traffic report / weather report sites that can give you indirect insight into things like. By indirect, I mean that you might be able to infer things like congestion at a specific point based on what you see on those sites.
BGP Peering relationships
You can look at pages like www.peeringdb.com, and you will typically see if $provider is at an exchange, however the peering relationships that many providers have other providers (locations, speeds, etc) are confidential.
path diversity
You can ask $provider's sales and marketing folks, but there is no guarantee that you will get an answer (actual routes are considered confidential and proprietary information, despite the fact that a lot of providers' fiber ends up converging in a small handful of routes in some areas - i.e. many of them follow the same set of railroad tracks or cross a river at the same bridge, possibly even in the same conduit) or a correct answer (wave X might be re-groomed onto path Y without a whole lot of customer notification).
IPv6 table size
Sites like routeviews.org can give you some visibility here.
Seems like everyone offers 5 9's service, 45 ms coast-to-coast, 24x7 customer support, 100/1Gbps/10Gbps with various DIR/CIR and burst rates. I'm shopping for new service and want to do better than choosing on reputation. (or, is reputation also a criteria?)
Absolutely reputation should be a factor. I would argue that Internet access is largely commoditized anymore (and has been for several years), so the real differentiators are cost and level of service. jms