number of hops != performance

Tue Nov 5 17:32:09 UTC 2002

In a commercial sense hops are seen as bad, points of failure(?) or 
'distance from the middle of the internet'?. Who knows

Traceroutes aren't great at seeing whats REALLY going on.

I suspect if everyone removed all their 'hop hiding' technology 
traceroutes would be at least 60% longer, the latency would remain the same.

Commercial sense doesn't have to make sense... If its what your 
competitors use to sell service, Hide your hops ;-)

G

Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> 
> We have competitors that are claiming that their network is superior to
> ours (salesdroids to customers) because they have fewer L3 hops in their
> network. I see this "fact" pop up in customer questions all the time. 
> 
> I can see that L3 hops adds latency if a network is built on slow (2meg
> for instance) links, but at gigabit speeds, L3 hops adds microseconds in
> latency (if you use equipment that forward using hardware-assisted
> forwarding, but as far as I know there are no routers out there nowadays
> that doesnt).
> 
> Does anyone have a nice reference I can point to to once and for all state
> that just because a customer has 6-8 L3 hops within our network (all at
> gigabit speeds or higher) that doesnt automatically mean they are getting
> bad performance or higher latency.
> 
> Hiding the L3 hops in a MPLS core (or other L2 switching) doesnt mean
> customers are getting better performance since equipment today forwards 
> just as quickly on L3 as on L2.
> 

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