What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider... Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from? Rob
On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:22PM -0700, Robert Sherrard wrote:
What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider...
Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from?
It has absolutely nothing to do with fiber. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_carrier As of this exact moment that I'm posting, that article is actually reasonably accurate. Of course I'm sure in 5 minutes 100 people will be updating it to include their favorite not-really-a-tier-1 carrier. :) -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)
Sorry... I should have clarified, I wasn't thinking it had anything to do w/ fiber or no fiber... that was just a secondary question. Rob Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:22PM -0700, Robert Sherrard wrote:
What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider...
Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from?
It has absolutely nothing to do with fiber.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_carrier
As of this exact moment that I'm posting, that article is actually reasonably accurate. Of course I'm sure in 5 minutes 100 people will be updating it to include their favorite not-really-a-tier-1 carrier. :)
At 01:58 AM 5/3/2006, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:22PM -0700, Robert Sherrard wrote:
What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider...
Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from?
It has absolutely nothing to do with fiber.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_carrier
As of this exact moment that I'm posting, that article is actually reasonably accurate. Of course I'm sure in 5 minutes 100 people will be updating it to include their favorite not-really-a-tier-1 carrier. :)
Someone added Cogent as a Tier 1, and there are others missing so I'd ignore the "who" is a tier 1 portion. -M< -- Martin Hannigan (c) 617-388-2663 Renesys Corporation (w) 617-395-8574 Member of Technical Staff Network Operations hannigan@renesys.com
so annoying. people keep trying to add several non-tier-1 providers in there. cogent 174 : no. buys transit from 2914 (NTT america/verio) btn 3491 : no. buys from savvis 3561 i believe ft 5511 : no. buys from sprint 1239 i'm pretty sure i saw some other silly ones in there, too, but i can't remember what they are at this point. the annoying cogent edits are coming from 72.66.2.5 (pool-72-66-2-5.washdc.fios.verizon.net), and they're persistent, so as is the normal case with wikipedia, the most fanatical person wins and the truth is hopefully somewhere near by. hopefully this person will soon tire. for the moment, the list looks mostly or completely correct. to underline a point made previously though: Tier-1 is a routing architecture term that doesn't have any useful direct bearing in how best to select a service provider. some of the best service providers in the world are not "tier-1" and some of the worst are ( i won't name members of either camp.). t. On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 10:06:52AM -0400, Martin Hannigan wrote:
At 01:58 AM 5/3/2006, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:22PM -0700, Robert Sherrard wrote:
What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider...
Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from?
It has absolutely nothing to do with fiber.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_carrier
As of this exact moment that I'm posting, that article is actually reasonably accurate. Of course I'm sure in 5 minutes 100 people will be updating it to include their favorite not-really-a-tier-1 carrier. :)
Someone added Cogent as a Tier 1, and there are others missing so I'd ignore the "who" is a tier 1 portion.
-M<
-- Martin Hannigan (c) 617-388-2663 Renesys Corporation (w) 617-395-8574 Member of Technical Staff Network Operations hannigan@renesys.com
-- _____________________________________________________________________ todd underwood +1 603 643 9300 x101 renesys corporation chief of operations & security todd@renesys.com http://www.renesys.com/blog/todd.shtml
On May 3, 2006, at 11:41 AM, Todd Underwood wrote:
to underline a point made previously though: Tier-1 is a routing architecture term that doesn't have any useful direct bearing in how best to select a service provider.
s/routing architecture/business/ It is possible to be a "Tier Two" provider and use communities & route-maps to look like a Tier One. You purchase transit, therefore are not tier one, but are unreachable through your transit unless the end point is a downstream of your transit provider. Architecturally, those are identical situations. Different commercial agreements, though. -- TTFN, patrick P.S. How much you wanna bet some of the "tier ones" are paying other "tier ones" more for fiber or colo or something than the "tier twos".
to underline a point made previously though: Tier-1 is a routing architecture term that doesn't have any useful direct bearing in how best to select a service provider. some of the best service providers in the world are not "tier-1" and some of the worst are ( i won't name members of either camp.).
The meaning of "tier 1" is not static. At one time it referred to providers with more-or-less national coverage who more-or-less owned their own facilities. Somewhere along the line, buyers decided that peering was an important factor in buying decisions and "tier 1" came to mean "companies who do not have blackholes because of lack of peering". Routing engineers interpreted this to mean "companies with settlement-free interconnect" since at the time, transit was seen as an inferior way to get connectivity. In today's world where latency and packet loss figures are more important to buying decisions, I suspect that "tier 1" refers to "companies who run good networks with no visible technical issues". In any case, "tier 1" is a marketing term that refers to the ranking of companies in terms of prefeability. Those companies whose services are highly preferred are in the TOP TIER of the ranking. After that there is a SECOND TIER which is good if you can't afford the top tier. There have always been people who made their buying decisions based on the NET EFFECT OF SEVERAL PROVIDERS rather than simply evaluating a provider standing alone. It is possible to buy service from two or three second tier providers and get BETTER THAN TIER 1 service. Mindless rankings and classification systems are not much help in making intelligent buying decisions. I really don't understand why people on this list care so much about marleting terminology. --Michael Dillon
From an off-list discussion: Does anyone know of an ISP that has paid transit from all known SFP (Tier 1) providers? (sort of the old SAVVIS model on steroids.) John
On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 11:25:35AM -0500, John Dupuy wrote:
From an off-list discussion:
Does anyone know of an ISP that has paid transit from all known SFP (Tier 1) providers? (sort of the old SAVVIS model on steroids.)
John
why would anyone do that? --bill
Internap? bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com wrote: On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 11:25:35AM -0500, John Dupuy wrote:
From an off-list discussion:
Does anyone know of an ISP that has paid transit from all known SFP (Tier 1) providers? (sort of the old SAVVIS model on steroids.)
John
why would anyone do that? --bill --------------------------------- Love cheap thrills? Enjoy PC-to-Phone calls to 30+ countries for just 2¢/min with Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.
At 12:57 PM 5/4/2006, Jon Lyons wrote:
Internap?
Yes. That's what I was thinking, but too easy? -M< -- Martin Hannigan (c) 617-388-2663 Renesys Corporation (w) 617-395-8574 Member of Technical Staff Network Operations hannigan@renesys.com
Well, I suppose that depends on what you mean by Tier 1. ;-) We do buy from a number of providers, many of which would be considered Tier 1 by many people. On Thu, 4 May 2006, Jon Lyons wrote:
Internap?
bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com wrote: On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 11:25:35AM -0500, John Dupuy wrote:
From an off-list discussion:
Does anyone know of an ISP that has paid transit from all known SFP (Tier 1) providers? (sort of the old SAVVIS model on steroids.)
John
why would anyone do that?
--bill
--------------------------------- Love cheap thrills? Enjoy PC-to-Phone calls to 30+ countries for just 2¢/min with Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.
-- Brandon Ross AIM: BrandonNRoss Director, Network Engineering ICQ: 2269442 Internap Skype: brandonross Yahoo: BrandonNRoss
Internap? bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com wrote: On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 11:25:35AM -0500, John Dupuy wrote:
From an off-list discussion:
Does anyone know of an ISP that has paid transit from all known SFP (Tier 1) providers? (sort of the old SAVVIS model on steroids.)
John
why would anyone do that? --bill --------------------------------- How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messengers low PC-to-Phone call rates.
On 5/4/06, Aaron Glenn <aaron.glenn@gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/4/06, bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com <bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com> wrote:
why would anyone do that?
--bill
Some companies feel entitled to charging more for their routes than they would for simple transit.
aaron.glenn
John: 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, since after that the packet switches to no money packets on a paid connection, pushing out the issue for things sent down that pipe... Peter Cohen
On 5/4/06, bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com <bmanning@vacation. karoshi.com> wrote:
why would anyone do that?
Hopefully this comes out clearly, as writing can be more confusing than speaking...
My point is it is hard to do anything beyond the first AS# for any SLA that you would be paying, since after that the packet switches to no money packets on a paid connection, pushing out the issue for things sent down that pipe...
Are you saying that there *IS* a good reason why anyone would buy paid transit from all SFP providers? And that the reason is so that you have a contractual SLA with all of those providers? If so then two questions come to mind. Couldn't you achieve the same thing by having paid peering with the SFP providers? Assuming that you do have contractual service with all of the SFP providers and that there is an SLA in all of those contracts, how do you deal with the fact that there is no SLA (to you) on packets which leave the set of SFP networks? Packets could leave by going to a transit customer of an SFP network or by going to a non-SFP peer of an SFP network. Quite frankly, while terminology like "transit", "settlement free peering" and "paid peering" are useful to analyze and talk about network topography, I don't think they are useful by themselves when making purchase decisions. They need to be backed up with some hard technical data about the network in question as well as the contractual terms (transit or peering) in place. It is not possible to say that a given network architecture is BETTER if you only know the transit/peering arrangements between that network and some subset of the other network operators. SFP operators will always be a subset of the entire public Internet. Membership in that set changes from time to time for various reasons. And the importance of non-members also varies from time to time, especially content-provider networks. --Michael Dillon P.S. I purposely did not use the term "tier" because I do not believe that current usage of this term refers to network architecture. It has more to do with market dominance than anything else and even there it is relative because there is no longer a single Internet access market.
On Tue, 02 May 2006 22:38:22 PDT, Robert Sherrard said:
What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider...
Usually it's defined as "Tier 1's don't buy transit, Tier 2's do". Of course, it gets a lot more complicated, because you can easily have a "Tier2" that's peering for 95% of its prefixes, and buying transit for 5% of not-often-used prefixes simply because it's expensive to get a peer for that 5%. But said Tier2 may be bigger than some "tier 1s", and be better on any *rational* comparison criteria (price, support, throughput, latency, jitter, downtime/SLA, path diversity, etc....) If a company is "almost a Tier1", but buys transit for several hundred prefixes coming from Korea and Nigeria (say, 0.2% out of the 180K or whatever the routing table is this week), why do you *care*, unless you have (or *seriously* plan to have) lots of packets coming and going to those 2 countries? In general, the people who *really* care about Tier 1/2 already know if they are a 1 or a 2 themselves. Almost everybody else falls into 2 categories: 1) People who are using 1/2 as a shortcut for doing a *proper* analysis of the options. 2) People who feel a marketing need to say "we peer with X Tier-1s". (OK, where's my asbestos long-johns? ;)
Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from?
Try asking? :) (And the answer will probably depend on which exact leg of their network you're asking about - it's almost certainly a patchwork....) It probably doesn't matter unless you're trying to buy connectivity over diverse paths - in which case you're going to have to ask *both* providers what the exact fiber routing is. It's possible the tier2 and the tier1 are both leasing previously-dark fiber in the same conduit - but leasing it from 2 different companies. And of course, it's quite possible that *this* week, that tier 2 is routing your packets over fiber they own, and next week, some traffic engineering puts your packets on fiber leased from A - and last week, it was on fiber leased from B. (Disclaimer: we're neither a Tier 1 or 2. And most of the routes we receive via a regional provider that treats us *very* nicely - mostly because we have them by the short-and-curlies. They piss us off too much, we turn off the phones in their NOC. ;)
(Disclaimer: we're neither a Tier 1 or 2. And most of the routes we receive via a regional provider that treats us *very* nicely - mostly because we have them by the short-and-curlies. They piss us off too much, we turn off the phones in their NOC. ;)
er... a typo? should be... "... we turn ON the phones in their NOC." --bill
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of
What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider...
This has been answered by Richard, but to put my two cents in - you shouldn't care. There is very little correlation between performance, support quality, or footprint and "tier status". That's one reason folks like Vijay Gill have been trying to get people to use more precise terms like "Settlement Free Interconnection" (e.g. "Verizon Business is completely SFI") rather than "Tier 1". Also, many companies (or their sales staffs) aren't truthful about their status, or make misrepresentations about what their status means. The list of extremely large and important non-Tier 1 carriers is long - look at DTAG, for instance, or Singtel.
Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from?
Rob
Cogent, for example, is a Tier 2, but that's not a good reason to either buy or not buy transit from them. There ARE good reasons (both ways) but that's not one of them. Daniel Golding
On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:22PM -0700, Robert Sherrard wrote:
What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider...
Marketing. The nomenclature is a completelyy irrelevant hangover of the NSFnet days when people thought in terms of "the backbone". If your providers' value is only in specific delicate contractural relationships that can vanish with little notice, is that really a value? You should examine carriers by your needs, performance, scope, reliability [human and network], cost, etc meaningful metrics. Get reference clients and query their technical staff. Get a view into their routing table and examine adjacenies.... if *you* care about a particular adjacency, press for performace data/trends. Joe -- RSUC / GweepNet / Spunk / FnB / Usenix / SAGE
The tier nomenclature also a really good way to instigate flame fests on lists such as this. Regards Marshall On May 3, 2006, at 12:23 PM, Joe Provo wrote:
On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:22PM -0700, Robert Sherrard wrote:
What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider...
Marketing.
The nomenclature is a completelyy irrelevant hangover of the NSFnet days when people thought in terms of "the backbone". If your providers' value is only in specific delicate contractural relationships that can vanish with little notice, is that really a value? You should examine carriers by your needs, performance, scope, reliability [human and network], cost, etc meaningful metrics. Get reference clients and query their technical staff. Get a view into their routing table and examine adjacenies.... if *you* care about a particular adjacency, press for performace data/trends.
Joe
-- RSUC / GweepNet / Spunk / FnB / Usenix / SAGE
Robert Sherrard wrote:
What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider...
"We are a tier 1 provider" = "I am a salesperson." "They are a tier 2 provider." = "I am a salesperson and they are our competitor".
Is it possible to determine who a tier 2 (i.e. Cogent) leases fiber from?
Ask them. They may not tell you (or know, depending on who you are talking to.) -- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Administration - jay@west.net NetLojix Communications, Inc. - http://www.netlojix.com/ WestNet: Connecting you to the planet. 805 884-6323
participants (17)
-
Aaron Glenn -
bmanning＠vacation.karoshi.com -
Brandon Ross -
Daniel Golding -
Jay Hennigan -
Joe Provo -
John Dupuy -
Jon Lyons -
Marshall Eubanks -
Martin Hannigan -
Michael.Dillon＠btradianz.com -
Patrick W. Gilmore -
Peter Cohen -
Richard A Steenbergen -
Robert Sherrard -
Todd Underwood -
Valdis.Kletnieks＠vt.edu