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
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. 
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:
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
No, turning the phones *on* is what you do to their help desk.
Turning off the phones shouldn't inconvenience a NOC that much, since most
of the people there probably have cell phones too. It mostly serves as a
reminder that their HVAC and electrical feeds are equally under our control.
(No, we've never actually had to do it, and the actual business relationship is
a *lot* more complicated than that - at one point, looking at the paperwork
it wasn't clear if we were buying bandwidth from ourselves, or if we were a
*re*seller of our bandwidth to ourselves.
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
Someone added Cogent as a Tier 1, and there are others missing so I'd
ignore the "who" is a tier 1 portion.
-M<
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.
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
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.
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.)
The tier nomenclature also a really good way to instigate flame fests on
lists such as this.
Regards
Marshall
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
why would anyone do that?
--bill
Internap?
Internap?
Yes. That's what I was thinking, but too easy?
-M<
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.