[lug] Tier 1 Providers (was: Re: IPv6)

[Nate Duehr]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 08, 2006 at 11:40:03PM -0600, Nate Duehr wrote:
>> Out of curiosity Sean, what's your definition of "Tier-1" these days?
> 
> The definition I use is an ISP that connects to the Internet via peering,
> as opposed to via transit.  If this statement doesn't mean anything to you,
> it looks like Wikipedia has a good discussion of it at:
> 
>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network#Politics
> 
> Thanks,
> Sean

The reason I asked is that there are some very large ISP's that do this 
now, like Cogent.  Last I checked all of their connectivity is via 
peering, but VERY big peering pipes.

Last year's debacle between Cogent and Level3 was that the traffic going 
between them on the peering arrangement links was imbalanced, and wasn't 
considered a good business deal for Level3.  Of course, Level3 found 
otherwise when they cut off thousands of Congent-serviced end-users (the 
lower-speed end, obviously) from thousands of Level3-serviced servers.

I'm amazed it all works at all, sometimes... the quagmire of peering and 
transit agreements is a lot more complex than it once was, and there are 
a whole lot less redundant paths that don't "accidentally" transit 
someone else's routers if a single link fails.

Nate