Tier 2 - Lease?

Wed May 3 13:20:55 UTC 2006

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at 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