How to choose a transit provider?

Fri Dec 14 16:18:07 UTC 2018

Hi

This depends a lot of who you are and where you are. For example apparently
Cogent is better in the USA compared to Europe. This would make them mostly
useful in Europe only if you have the traffic to be multi homed, while
someone in USA might be able to use them as their only provider.

If you are going to have only one provider, I would recommend to stay away
from the so called Tier 1 providers. You want a smaller local provider,
which has multiple upstreams and at least some local peering. Sometimes the
tier 1 can get you the best quote and their sales people will certainly
tell you all about their superior network and how many global connected
customers. But more often than not, the interconnect between the various
tier 1 providers is not good and you end up with bad connectivity to
whoever they are at war with at the moment.

If you have enough traffic to justify multiple upstreams, you can do the
tier 1 game. But you still have to be careful to have good local peering.
At least if your customers are close to your own physical location. In my
country there are several of the big american transit providers. They only
have good connectivity to other local companies, that happens to also buy
directly from the same transit provider. The tier 1 will refuse to peer
with just about anyone and this makes their local connectivity poor.

Also consider the wildcard called HE.net. They are the opposite to the old
tier 1 in that he.net peers with everyone locally. On the other hand, their
global network might not be as good (although my experience is that they
are pretty good). I am using he.net as an alternative to joining the too
expensive local internet exchanges. It is cheaper to get he.net and he.net
will be able to get all the peerings that I can't.

Another interesting player is NL-IX. I know this is an european thing. I
believe their concept could spread. They take distributed IX to the next
level with a IX network that covers large part of Europe.

If you are an eyeball ISP you also need to consider caches and direct
peerings with the big content providers. Akamai, Google, Netflix, Apple,
Microsoft etc. If you are hosting provider, those same peerings are
completely irrelevant.

 Regards,

Baldur
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