"Tier 1" ?

Joel on Software is a good blog, but in his most recent post he makes an unfortunately common mistake.

He call's his ISP (peer1) a "tier 1 provider".

Now, that sounds impressive (and so lots of marketing departments like to call the network they represent "tier 1"), but there's actually a precise technical definition of tier 1. Peer1's network information page says that they have four tier 1 upstream providers but tier 1 networks, by definition, have no upstream providers. This means that they're not running a tier 1 network. This doesn't mean that they're not running a really good network (in fact, there are experts who would recommend connecting to good tier 2 networks instead of tier 1 networks to avoid problems that can happen when there are peering disputes between tier 1 networks).

0 TrackBacks

Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: "Tier 1" ?.

TrackBack URL for this entry: https://geeklair.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/715

Leave a comment

February 2008

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
          1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29  
Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.