Re: Current street prices for US Internet Transit

[Michael.Dillon () radianz com]

> Well, with the GSR (and alike) you're paying for high MTBF, large 
buffers
> and quick re-routing when something happens, so yes, this is a quality
> issue and that's why you should care and make an informed decision.

There's more than one way to do things.

Some people manage MTBF by having more cheaper boxes in a resilient
architecture so that the failure of a box has minimal impact on
the transport of packets.

Some people don't have buffers in their routers because they
provide a consistently low latency service (low jitter).

Some people do rerouting at the SDH layer so that routers don't need
to reroute. Or they put a lot of effort into managing their lower
layers so that failures happen very infrequently and therefore routers
don't need to reroute.

To make a truly informed decision you need hard data on network
performance. Brands and models of routers are irrelevant. When I look
at point-to-point latency graphs on a network and see constantly
varying latency in almost a sine wave pattern, I know that the
provider is doing something wrong. I may not know whether it is
too-large buffers on the routers, congested circuit, or poorly
managed underlying ATM/FR network, but the data tells the true 
story.

If you care about quality, don't buy unless you can see hard data
on the network's performance over a reasonable time period, i.e.
6 months to a year.

And not everybody needs to care about quality that much.

-Michael Dillon