Are the terms tier-1,2,3 dead terms or still valid ways to define carriers?
Yes, pretty much dead.
There are networks that meet your price / performance, and those that
don't.
So there are now Carrier Class carriers and Food Grade Carriers?
Who in the greater community defines terms like this?
This debate has spilled onto NANOG from Facebook now...
My point is that while the term tier-1 (meaning no transit) isn't wrong, that the whole system is now irrelevant. Look at the Wikipedia list of "Tier 1" networks and then look at CAIDA, Dyn, QRator, HE's BGP Report, etc. There's some overlap between the historical "tier 1s" and the other rankings of usefulness, but the "tier 1s" are no longer the dominate networks they once were.
This debate has spilled onto NANOG from Facebook now...
My point is that while the term tier-1 (meaning no transit) isn't wrong,
that the whole system is now irrelevant. Look at the Wikipedia list of
"Tier 1" networks and then look at CAIDA, Dyn, QRator, HE's BGP Report,
etc. There's some overlap between the historical "tier 1s" and the other
rankings of usefulness, but the "tier 1s" are no longer the dominate
networks they once were.True.
For me the distinction is nearly all carriers provide full access to the
internet, -- that is their job and the product they sell. While HE and
Cogent only provide a subset. In the case of Cogent, they provide an even
smaller subset since they don't provide access to Google on their ISP
service.
Your Sales & Marketing teams :-)...
Mark.
What I witnessed in Asia-Pac, Africa and parts of Europe, is that
inexperienced engineers as well as sales & marketing people would use
the term "Tier 1" to refer to incumbent telecoms providers, especially
if they are either a monopoly or had the largest customer base in that
country and/or region.
Nowadays, I'm hearing this less and less, but it's not completely gone.
Mark.
Putting aside the question of their importance, there is a small number
of ISPs that do no pay for transit. If you don't call them Tier 1, what
do you call them? Transit Free Providers (TFPs)?
>
> Nowadays, I'm hearing this less and less, but it's not completely gone.Putting aside the question of their importance, there is a small number
of ISPs that do no pay for transit. If you don't call them Tier 1, what
do you call them? Transit Free Providers (TFPs)?
I think the broader and more relevant question is -- Does it matter who
pays who ? Why name an irrelevant characteristic?
Cogent may not buy transit but i would not purchase their service since
they fail to have full internet reach (google and HE)
And xyz incumbent may have a poor network, but they may get free peering or
may get paid-peering because of their incumbent / monopoly status... that
is not a reason for me to purchase from them or think they are an elite
tier 1.
The dynamica of the day are more around reach and quality, not some legacy
measure of how market-failure facilitate anti-social behavior
My terminology of tiers are:
Tier 1 - is in few or no major disputes, has no transit, and is able to
access over three nines percent of the internet
Tier 2 - as Tier 1, but has transit.
Cogent is neither on v6, and I have no clue about v4.
HE is probably Tier 2 on v4, and is Tier 1 on v6.
so cogent has no routes to some amount of v6? ie no routes
to some prefixes?
/kc
so cogent has no routes to some amount of v6? ie no routes
to some prefixes?
it's easy enough to test
Test Router Location Hostname / IP Address
2607:f8b0:4005:801::200e
Go!
Tue May 16 04:00:27.010 UTC
% Network not in table
They're not the sole provider with a hole in their routing table, nor is
that the only hole. I would probably choose not to single home behind
any nominally SFI carrier, but on the other hand how useful such carrier
is in the first place has a lot to do with can they offload the traffic
you choose to send them, which is a different problem and should be
assessed accordingly.
Putting aside the question of their importance, there is a small number
of ISPs that do no pay for transit. If you don't call them Tier 1, what
do you call them? Transit Free Providers (TFPs)?
LFB, late for breakfast