List,
Neither Sprint nor Qwest are serious about earning my business and are not
providing me with their network peering details. I was hoping that the
list might have the collective resources to help me determine who has
better peering.
thanks
chirstopher
The latest (april 2002) Skitter data shows sprint being slightly closer to the internet core than qwest.
Check it out:
http://www.caida.org/analysis/topology/as_core_network/pics/ascoreApr2002.gif
-Brent
Neither Sprint nor Qwest are serious about earning my business and are not
providing me with their network peering details. I was hoping that the
list might have the collective resources to help me determine who has
better peering.
Aren't we six years past the point where people ask because they have
a well founded concern?
Here's a good set: {1, 701, 1239, 3561, 7018}
Buy from any, buy from all.
All will piss you off at one time or another,
all will pass your bits as well as the next guy (at one time or another).
-mark
Once upon a time, Mark Kent <mark@noc.mainstreet.net> said:
Here's a good set: {1, 701, 1239, 3561, 7018}
You need to remove 3561 from the set, as they are removing customers
from their network (we got our letter from C&W last week, the week
_after_ we got a call from the friendly New Edge Networks salesperson
telling us our circuit was being moved).
Neither Sprint nor Qwest are serious about earning my business and are not
providing me with their network peering details. I was hoping that the
list might have the collective resources to help me determine who has
better peering.
chirstopher
Chirstopher,
Your comment "serious about earning my business" demands reply.... I'm still in awe of tier ones and their reluctance to provide their potential customers with the facts--be it true or ficticious--that would seel the deal. I've learned a couple things about peering: one, unless your traffic goes to or thru them it doesn't matter; and two, pay attention to where they peer as much as with whom. Granted, information can be scarce until after the contract is signed, but enormous amounts of info may be extrapolated from transit hops thre your current provider. Take advantage of Cflow/Arts info, and/or use routeservers to determine AS hops. Aside from all my "do the homework" answers, I would have to say that Qwest and Sprint are quite similar, with one exeption: I once had a serious problem with Sprint, and after some minor unpleasantries was able to talk to a knowledgable engineer who told me the truth, something I have never been able to accomplish with Qwest. 2 cents.
sig=$header
Well Sprints non-peering policy is second to none if that helps with C&W a close
second..... 
Steve
What possible reason would the average small transit buyer have for
knowing the details of a carrier's peering arrangements - especially
carriers like Sprint and Qwest?
Both Sprint and Qwest are, most would agree, transit-free, "tier 1"
networks. They interconnect with all other similarly large networks. How
much more do you want? The size of their interconnections to 701? I'm not
sure how that is useful.
The only really useful information about peering from carriers of this
size might be packet loss statistics across private peering connections.
That is an actual performance metric, and could tend to seperate some
providers from others, and reward those who keep their peering connections
properly sized. Perhaps this is what you mean by "better" peering?
Locations and sizes won't help you at all, if this is what you are looking
for.
I suppose the question is, what is your goal? If you are looking for
transit, there are numerous criteria -
- price
- customer service
- clueful engineer accessability
- network stability
- network "reach" - i.e. do they have a POP where you want to
interconnect?
- Packetloss and latency metrics
- Special features - rich community set, multicast, etc
- Dan
Aren't we six years past the point where people ask because they have
a well founded concern?
No.
In today's environment, the difference between vendors who represent
themselves as transit providers can be orders of magnitude, measured in
terms of peering fan-out, number of connections per peer, direct
high-volume customer connectivity, ASN connectivity, and, most
importantly, peering bandwidth per POP.
If you are a T1 customer, it won't matter. If you are a multi OC48
customer, it matters very very much.
You might even be quite surprised by some of the names on the list and
where they place.
You can prove it to yourself, if you can get the data. Or you can just
offer the load and see what happens.
I prefer the former.
Regards,
Eric Carroll
Tekton Internet Associates
http://west-boot.mfnx.net/traffic/sjc/sjc-sprint-oc3.html
http://west-boot.mfnx.net/traffic/iad/iad-sprint-oc3.html
http://west-boot.mfnx.net/traffic/chi/chi-sprint.html
http://west-boot.mfnx.net/traffic/nyc/nyc-sprint.html
http://west-boot.mfnx.net/traffic/lax/lax-sprint.html
'cause yeah, no "tier 1" has ever run congested to another, right?
OK, given the choice between tier 1 "A" and tier 1 "B",
suppose you can show that interconnect bandwidth between
the two is underprovisioned. Armed with that knowledge,
which of the two do you choose as your transit provider?
In a message written on Fri, Oct 18, 2002 at 04:56:13PM -0500, Mark Borchers wrote:
OK, given the choice between tier 1 "A" and tier 1 "B",
suppose you can show that interconnect bandwidth between
the two is underprovisioned. Armed with that knowledge,
which of the two do you choose as your transit provider?
Much of nanog suggests you should always have two providers. If
indeed A and B were congested to each other, and everything else
was equal, then those two providers would be your best choice.
In reality it's never that simple. Two providers may have the same
number of peers and total bandwidth, however one may have all of
them in your city, and another may have none in your city. It
could be argued that you will get better performance from the one
who has them in your city.
At the end of the day, no provider is even 50% of the internet (my
assertion), which means more of your bits will leave your providers
network then will stay on it. If the majority of your bits are
crossing interconnects to other providers, and they won't tell you
anything about those interconnects, shouldn't that raise a red
flag?
Disclosure is a complicated problem. Peering contracts can prohibit
it. Everyone wants to hide their own skeletons. Information is
often distorted on the way from engineering to sales. That's no
reason to take "trust us, we do a good job" as an answer. Having
the information to make your own decision is important.
I would agree with that "no provider is 50% of the internet" if you by
that mean no provider has 50% of all internet traffic. I do however think
it's possible that in some provider networks, 50% (or close to it anyway)
of the traffic coming into the network from customers, exit on a customer
port. This of course doesn't necessarily mean that 50% of the traffic sent
to your customer comes from other customers (that I find very unlikely).
/nco
What possible reason would the average small transit buyer have for
knowing the details of a carrier's peering arrangements - especially
carriers like Sprint and Qwest?
Are you suggesting that small providers care less about who they purchase their
Internet connectivity from? Hmm.
Both Sprint and Qwest are, most would agree, transit-free, "tier 1"
networks. They interconnect with all other similarly large networks. How
much more do you want? The size of their interconnections to 701? I'm not
sure how that is useful.
Depends what you're looking at. If you believe that redundancy and reliability
are linked to diversity then its very relevant for you to have feel for the
general policies and infrastructure but no, not individual peering sessions.
The only really useful information about peering from carriers of this
size might be packet loss statistics across private peering connections.
Well no, theres more useful info.. these details only show the network operating
normally. In the event of a Sep 11th type disruption of a major Internet wide
routing issue this might be the difference between slight disruption and major
disruption.
Steve
> What possible reason would the average small transit buyer have for
> knowing the details of a carrier's peering arrangements - especially
> carriers like Sprint and Qwest?Are you suggesting that small providers care less about who they purchase their
Internet connectivity from? Hmm.
Of course I didn't say that. I did say that smaller transit customers
have, or should have, a set of criteria where their upstream's peering
arrangements are not at the top of the list. Customer support, speed of
provisioning, and feature-set all tend to be more important for the
smaller transit buyer. Peering congestion may be an issue - however, sizes
and locations of peering interconnects are not, unless you have enough
traffic to potentially overwhelm one.
[snip]
"Dude, where's the core?"
(ducks)
-C