On 5/5/06, Peter Cohen <peterattelia@gmail.com> 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 <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com> <todd@vierling.name>