what exactly is 'tier 1'? and how do you determine the quality of bandwidth?

Whn you "ping a server" thats mean:

you have to whip out your cock and jam it in the back slots . thus know as pinging. If your cock gets a shock in less than 1 sec you know you have a fast server.

clever
but I don't think we're on the same page here

I am sure that someone will correct me if I am wrong but I belive this is correct tier 1 is a dual twisted pair copper conductors capable of transfering at a max data rate of 1.54 mbps. The actual transfer rate is dependant on the how far the T1 connection run the farther it is the lower the speed.
a T! connection is great if you are an adult webmaster and using it to connect to your computer. a ping is a small packet of data that is sent to a server then a response from the server is waited on. Ping is usually use to maintain a connection to a dial up, monitor a server to make sure it is still online ect.ect.. ms is milli seconds. Doing a trace route to a server will show the number of hops between you and the server and the responce time of each hop is measure in ms.

Nbritt

Great info Nbritt, just one question about the 'ms'. What is a acceptable amount of ms? what ms is considered slow? what is considered normal? what is fast? thank you

Tier 1 is a "coined" term. At it's basic form, it's the provider who all others go to for IP transit. In other words, It's a provider with several hundred peers, consistent roundtrip times, and decent uptime. (99.999%).

Don't get to caught up in the term "Tier 1". In my humble opinion, in the hosting business you typically get what you pay for.

80ms MAX Domestic US (East coast to West Coast) is considered good.

120ms MAX to Europe from the US (East or West) is considered good.


100ms MAX to Asia from the US (East or West) is considered good.

What Nbritt said here has nothing to do with the term "Tier 1".. he's talking about T1 connections. A T1 is a connection with throughput of about 1.54 mbits/sec.. A *sustained* 1.5 megabits/sec for a month is *about* 450/GBytes of data transfer...

Tier 1 refers to how close to the "Backbone" a company's servers/network are physically located. The idea being, the closer to the "backbone" the fewer hops (ie: routers) data will have to traverse to get to it's destination.

In reality right now there are a lot of major "backbones" that make up the internet. So being well connected to all or most of them makes for fast reliable bandwidth.

See I knew someone would correct me if I was wrong T1 Tier 1 seems I confused the two

Nbritt

word is born...

Tier 1 means a backbone who doesn't buy connectivity from anyone else, but has full internet connectivity, this includes companies like uunet, att, level/genuity, qwest, verio, abovenet. being a tier1 has nothing to do with quality, and it *CAN* actually mean lower quality. a tier 1 WONT pay to send traffic somewhere, so if two tier1's get in a pissing contest and shut down peering, and you're a customer of one of them, you're fucked.

traceroutes/pings/ms times... a ping is a (usually small) packet that you send to a server, and count the time it takes to come back. a traceroute is many ping packets that are sent with special ttl flags to show every "hop" (router) in between you and the server, and it's responce time, showing you the path. It is very common for most of the latency to be between you and your dial/dsl/cable provider.

For example, say you have a uunet dialup in NYC, and you are tracerouting to your quality webhosting company in NYC. you will have 250ms between you and uunet, and uunet will have 0.1ms between them and your webhosting company. 250ms is 'bad', but it isn't your hosts' fault. DSL/Cablemodem usually inject between 10-30ms on the first hop.

Basically, if you are in the USA, and your hosting company is in the USA, and you are on dsl/cable, subtract the 'first hop' ping times from the 'last hop' ping times, if it's over 100, there's a problem, and you shuold let the host know. it may be your isp's fault, it may be your host's fault, or someone inbetween.

Geographical location usually has a lot to do with ping times, if you are in california, tracerouting to a shitty isp there, and then traceroute to a quality host in nyc, you will probably get better ping times to the shitty carrier in california, but remember that overall, most people will get better connections to the better carrier on the other side (if the other side is in fact a better company, with better routes).