[165255] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Evaluating Tier 1 Internet providers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Abley)
Tue Aug 27 15:15:34 2013
From: Joe Abley <jabley@hopcount.ca>
In-Reply-To: <017601cea358$00a86ad0$01f94070$@com>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 15:14:47 -0400
To: Eric Louie <elouie@yahoo.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 2013-08-27, at 15:02, Eric Louie <elouie@yahoo.com> 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?
>=20
> routing stability
>=20
> BGP community offerings
>=20
> congestion issues
>=20
> BGP Peering relationships
>=20
> path diversity
>=20
> IPv6 table size
I would add:
- presence of staff in key locations (if 60 Hudson is a critical =
location for you, find out whether there's someone regularly present in =
or near the building to clean fibre and help run loopback tests when you =
need them)
- expected time to clue when calling the support number (bonus points =
for being xkcd-806 compliant)
- time taken to turn around BGP import filter changes
- response you can expect when you call one day and say "our 10GE is =
maxed out with inbound traffic from apparently everywhere, it has been =
going on for an hour, please help"
- billing accuracy, and turnaround time for questions raised about =
invoices received
A lot of this comes down to conversations in the NANOG bar with people =
who have war stories to share. To that extent, I think "reputation" is a =
good indicator, so long as your sample size is reasonable, and depending =
on the amount of beer involved.
One other thing to think about -- Tier 1 providers are transit free, so =
your "can be reached by an IP packet from" is naturally limited to =
specific peering relationships with other Tier 1 providers. Tier 2 =
providers (those who buy transit from a suitably-diverse set of Tier 1s) =
can insulate you from route fade due to peering spats.
Joe=
