North American Network Operators Group
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Re: number of hops != performance

  • From: Gary Coates
  • Date: Tue Nov 05 12:35:41 2002

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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