True Peers, Near Peers, Pseudo Peers, and Bandwidth Resellers

Mon Jul 21 15:26:01 UTC 1997

On Mon, 21 Jul 1997, Rod Nayfield wrote:

> Agreed.  To sum it up:
> 
> It seems that the general use of 'tiers' is based on who carries a
> network's IP traffic.
> .A first tier provider does not purchase transit from anyone

Purchase, or exchange. I.E. I was getting some transit from a customer,
but I did not pay for it. So to be a first tier your routes must only be
announced by you, and no other AS. I am not sure if CIX should count or
not. Netrail was using CIX to get to 1 provider that was not peering, we
now have peering with them, and are going to kill our CIX connection. I am
not sure if this should count as being a tier one or not. It soon will
not be a issue because MCI, UUNET, ANS, Sprint, Netrail and others are
pulling from CIX. 

> .A second tier provider buys from a first tier

Yes, but they also may have NAP connection, and may even have a nationwide
backbone. There are many second tier providers who have nationwide DS3
networks, and peer at many naps, but still have a small amount of transit
to get to places they can't get peering setup with. Most of them want to
be first tier, but should not be counted. 

> .A third tier provider buys from a second tier provider and so on...
> 
> generally there are a few first tiers who peer at many locations and many
> second tiers who are at one or two IXs and have a transit agreement, and
> zillions of people who buy T1s and T3s and resell.

Nathan Stratton                                President, NetRail,Inc.
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