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Re: Sprint VS. Qwest

  • From: Leo Bicknell
  • Date: Fri Oct 18 18:27:54 2002
  • Reply-by: Fri Oct 25 18:15:15 EDT 2002

In a message written on Fri, Oct 18, 2002 at 04:56:13PM -0500, Mark Borchers wrote:
> OK, given the choice between tier 1 "A" and tier 1 "B",
> suppose you can show that interconnect bandwidth between
> the two is underprovisioned.  Armed with that knowledge,
> which of the two do you choose as your transit provider?

Much of nanog suggests you should always have two providers.  If
indeed A and B were congested to each other, and everything else
was equal, then those two providers would be your best choice.

In reality it's never that simple.  Two providers may have the same
number of peers and total bandwidth, however one may have all of
them in your city, and another may have none in your city.  It
could be argued that you will get better performance from the one
who has them in your city.

At the end of the day, no provider is even 50% of the internet (my
assertion), which means more of your bits will leave your providers
network then will stay on it.  If the majority of your bits are
crossing interconnects to other providers, and they won't tell you
anything about those interconnects, shouldn't that raise a red
flag?

Disclosure is a complicated problem.  Peering contracts can prohibit
it.  Everyone wants to hide their own skeletons.  Information is
often distorted on the way from engineering to sales.  That's no
reason to take "trust us, we do a good job" as an answer.  Having
the information to make your own decision is important.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - [email protected] - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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