Worldcom has done it again, they just had a major fiber cut in IL Nathan Stratton President, NetRail,Inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phone (888)NetRail NetRail, Inc. Fax (404)522-1939 230 Peachtree Suite 500 WWW http://www.netrail.net/ Atlanta, GA 30303 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. - Psalm 33:16 On Fri, 18 Jul 1997, Mark Kent wrote:
Clearly the definition of tiers varies over time. I think that the tools needed to "measure" the current tier-ness of providers are:
a) a full bgp table (not just a full route table... if net FOO appears behind AS3561, AS1239 and AS1 then you want all three entries). b) a suitably large group of companies whose net access depends on how you extract a route table from the full bgp table c) a stopwatch d) a phone
The procedure is basically to eliminate an AS from getting in the route table and timing how fast the phone rings. Then you just need a scale, something like this
0 - 2 minutes: Tier 1 2 - 10 minutes: Tier 2 etc.
In some cases you can replace the stopwatch with a calendar.
You can flesh out this methodology with extras like frequency of calls, duration of calls, language used in the calls, whether you are threatened or not, whether your family is threatened, etc.
This technique has been used by some service providers by way of their peering strategy.
-mark