Evaluating Tier 1 Internet providers

Tue Aug 27 21:57:47 UTC 2013

From: Bryan Socha [mailto:bryan at serverstack.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2013 2:45 PM
To: Eric Louie; nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: Evaluating Tier 1 Internet providers

To add some more from recent experiences..  Most of these are in colocation
datacenters.

[EL>] I'm colocated too.

- speed to handle your emergency support call.     (recent experience, some
tier1 can take a couple hours)
[EL>]  time to respond / time to resolve are good ones (hard to get them to
provide the true values, though)

- if support requires a portal opened ticket, is the staff to reset a
password also 24/7.

- Latency in your region.    (recent experience: I removed 4 circuits
because the backbones weren't the same in different areas).

- Is you location a pop, metro ring or dedicated fiber elsewhere.   

- To get more specific, where is their peering in relationship to you.
Strong peering not near you could mean a lot of extra latency just to get
off their network.

[EL>] "How many hops to their edge"?  Will they admit that?  can I get a
traceroute?  (however, this is in downtown LA so I'm guessing it's close to
the edge

thanks,
Bryan Socha