Evaluating Tier 1 Internet providers
Justin M. Streiner
streiner at cluebyfour.org
Tue Aug 27 16:17:19 UTC 2013
On Tue, 27 Aug 2013, Eric Louie wrote:
> Based on various conversation threads on Nanog I've come up with a few
> criteria for evaluating Tier 1 providers. I'm open to add other criteria -
> what would you add to this list? And how would I get a quantitative or
> qualitative measure of it?
Define "Tier 1 provider". I ask this because it's something that many
people don't know what it means, but assume that Tier 1 > Tier !=1.
> routing stability
Routeviews.org can shed some light here.
> BGP community offerings
If $provider has a page on www.peeringdb.com, they might publish a list of
their BGP communities there. Other places to look would be the provider's
whois/IRR entries, and on their respective websites, or the
sales/marketing folks might be able to get this information for you.
> congestion issues
There are various internet traffic report / weather report sites that can
give you indirect insight into things like. By indirect, I mean that you
might be able to infer things like congestion at a specific point based on
what you see on those sites.
> BGP Peering relationships
You can look at pages like www.peeringdb.com, and you will typically see
if $provider is at an exchange, however the peering relationships that
many providers have other providers (locations, speeds, etc) are
confidential.
> path diversity
You can ask $provider's sales and marketing folks, but there is no
guarantee that you will get an answer (actual routes are considered
confidential and proprietary information, despite the fact that a lot of
providers' fiber ends up converging in a small handful of routes in some
areas - i.e. many of them follow the same set of railroad tracks or cross
a river at the same bridge, possibly even in the same conduit) or a
correct answer (wave X might be re-groomed onto path Y without a whole
lot of customer notification).
> IPv6 table size
Sites like routeviews.org can give you some visibility here.
> Seems like everyone offers 5 9's service, 45 ms coast-to-coast, 24x7
> customer support, 100/1Gbps/10Gbps with various DIR/CIR and burst rates.
> I'm shopping for new service and want to do better than choosing on
> reputation. (or, is reputation also a criteria?)
Absolutely reputation should be a factor. I would argue that Internet
access is largely commoditized anymore (and has been for several years),
so the real differentiators are cost and level of service.
jms
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