At 6:09 PM +0000 7/17/97, Danny wrote:
Does everyone agree with this,
Nope. I wrote up a description of the tiers over a year ago but it's a little dated now. You can read it at http://sidhe.memra.com/rough.txt but I think that the tier 2 that I described has gotten fuzzier over time. I still believe that the best indicator of a tier one provider is that their network spans a continent. Of course there are other characteristics that the top tier shares for the most part but the continent spanning seems to be the best characteristic to hang a rule of thumb on.
Tier 1: _Owns the fiber_, Multiple coast to coast paths of significant bandwidth Tier 2: Reseller, Major connections (DS3/OC3) to multiple tier 1 providers. Possibly: Major connections to one (1) tier 1 provider. Tier 3: Everybody else.
This is describing telecomm companies, i.e. Worldcom, AT&T, et all are Tier one, then the long distance resellers and then the LECs etc. But this has nothing to do with the Internet so it's wrong. Fiber is irrelevant to the Internet. IP flows and routers are all that matters. P.S. no doubt some of you are about to point out that fiber is important because we need it to run IP flows between routers. But the point is that IP flows run over *ANYTHING* and the Internet is th collection of IP flows and routers. IP flows are lines and routers are dots. Look familiar? ******************************************************** Michael Dillon voice: +1-415-482-2840 Senior Systems Architect fax: +1-415-482-2844 PRIORI NETWORKS, INC. http://www.priori.net "The People You Know. The People You Trust." ********************************************************