Tier Zero (was Re: Tier 2 - Lease?)

Fri May 5 16:53:43 UTC 2006

On 5/5/06, Peter Cohen <peterattelia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hopefully this comes out clearly, as writing can be more confusing
> than speaking...
> Are you getting at Inter AS /SLA/QOS that you would get from transit
> vs. best effort peering?   Even that has some issues, the one that
> jumps out to me is hopefully clearly stick figure-diagrammed below:
>
> AS#x $--SLA-->Transit  ok...
> But...
> AS#x $--SLA-->Transit <-(second hop)--Customers/Peers---No Qos/SLA--->
>
> My point is it is hard to do anything beyond the first AS# for any SLA
> that you would be paying,

You can't *guarantee* better service once the packet leaves your
provider's upstream ASs.  However, there are hardware-appliance and
connectivity vendors who make it their job to come very close, as long
as the far-end network has at least one good, near-end reachable path.
That's where the concept of route control (where BGP, with all the
modern weighting frills, is not the final arbiter of route decisions)
comes into play.  Extending that concept, if *both* ends have some
sort of route control in place, via the same vendor or not, you're
even more likely to get good service quality even if the SFI providers
in the middle suck at any given time.

(ObAdvertisingSquelch:  I have direct involvement in this subject, so
I won't discuss vendor names on-list to avoid conflict of interest.)

--
-- Todd Vierling <tv at duh.org> <tv at pobox.com> <todd at vierling.name>