Tier 2 - Lease?

Wed May 3 16:23:07 UTC 2006

On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:22PM -0700, Robert Sherrard wrote:
> 
> What make a provider a tier 2, versus a tier 1 provider...

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

-- 
             RSUC / GweepNet / Spunk / FnB / Usenix / SAGE