[53203] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: number of hops != performance
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gary Coates)
Tue Nov 5 12:33:54 2002
Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2002 17:32:09 +0000
From: Gary Coates <gary@newnet.co.uk>
To: Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
In a commercial sense hops are seen as bad, points of failure(?) or
'distance from the middle of the internet'?. Who knows
Traceroutes aren't great at seeing whats REALLY going on.
I suspect if everyone removed all their 'hop hiding' technology
traceroutes would be at least 60% longer, the latency would remain the same.
Commercial sense doesn't have to make sense... If its what your
competitors use to sell service, Hide your hops ;-)
G
Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
>
> We have competitors that are claiming that their network is superior to
> ours (salesdroids to customers) because they have fewer L3 hops in their
> network. I see this "fact" pop up in customer questions all the time.
>
> I can see that L3 hops adds latency if a network is built on slow (2meg
> for instance) links, but at gigabit speeds, L3 hops adds microseconds in
> latency (if you use equipment that forward using hardware-assisted
> forwarding, but as far as I know there are no routers out there nowadays
> that doesnt).
>
> Does anyone have a nice reference I can point to to once and for all state
> that just because a customer has 6-8 L3 hops within our network (all at
> gigabit speeds or higher) that doesnt automatically mean they are getting
> bad performance or higher latency.
>
> Hiding the L3 hops in a MPLS core (or other L2 switching) doesnt mean
> customers are getting better performance since equipment today forwards
> just as quickly on L3 as on L2.
>
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