What's The Difference Between Tier-1-Tier-2-And Tier-3 Bandwidth Providers To Your Business?

"Tiers" in the telecom world tends to have multiple definitions, depending on who you ask. What tier a bandwidth carrier is, is loosely defined at best and everyone has their own opinion of what tier a carrier might be. Here is my opinion:

Tier-1: [may be considered an RBOC or LEC - Regional Bell Operating Company or Local Exchange Carrier]

Tier-1 is a network in which only settlement free peers and customers are serviced. The network operator pays for none of it's transit.

What's The Difference Between Tier-1-Tier-2-And Tier-3 Bandwidth Providers To Your Business?

Tier-1 is the optimum network backbone for medium to large businesses with critical reliability, stability, and scalability requirements.

Tier-1 can be an advantage when it comes to handling DDoS attacks: if you ask/configure your Tier-1 provider to null-route an IP they will implement the null-route at their borders, so there is no point of saturation.

Examples of US Tier 1 carriers:

Qwest

AT&T (formerly SBC, Bell South, Southwestern Bell, Ameritech)

Savvis

Verizon (formerly MCI and UUNET)

Global Crossing

Level 3 (recently merged with Broadwing)

NTT Communications

Tier-2: [may be considered a CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier); has their own network, but also resells tier 1]

Tier-2 is where the network operator buys all or some of it's transit from a Tier-1 and resells it.

Tier-2 can be an advantage if you need someone to provide quality bandwidth, and especially if your need is a single install location. If you buy from Tier-1 #1 in New York, and #1 has a problem with its Tier-1 #2 peering router in New York, then all your traffic from you to #2 may be affected. Your ability to shout at #1 and get them to fix it will be limited, especially if the problem is with #2's border router. A good Tier-2 will monitor its upstreams and their peering points for trouble, and take measures to ensure that it doesn't affect their customers. Even if you need multi-location installs, buying from a good Tier-2 can be useful.

A Tier-2 that only responds to severe problems (e.g. total outage of an upstream link) is no more useful than a Tier-1 to someone who has multi-locations.

Pricing from Tier-2 ISPs is often cheaper at the low-end (e.g. T1). Tier-2's will often beat the tier-1's in pricing "access services". But if you buy in the hundreds of megabits, a Tier-2 is likely to quote much higher than a Tier-1.

Tier-2's are usually smaller companies, and are better able to "make deals", or recognize bundling of contracts, write custom SLAs (Service Level Agreements), trench fiber to your location in exchange for that signed contract, etc. Unless you buy multiple gigabits from your upstreams, if you want to bundle contracts with Tier-1s, you will probably end-up doing it through a wholesaler or other buying mechanism.

Examples of US Tier-2 carriers:

XO Communications

Covad

Paetec/US LEC

Time Warner Telecom (recently merged with Xpedius)

Eschelon Telecom Inc

Cogent Communications

Speakeasy

Embarq

McLeodUSA

AOL Transit Data Network

Covista

IDT Corp.

Tier 3: [wholesalers /resellers of tier 1 and 2 networks]

Tier-3 are downstream customers of Tier-2's. Tier-3 may give you what looks like a good price.....but longterm reliability, performance, and scalability will likely suffer. For piece of mind for your business a Tier-1 or Tier-2 are better choices is almost every case. However, PowerNet Global is a big exception to this rule due to their solid infrastructure and relationships with major players.

Examples of US Tier-3 carriers:

Trinsic

Excel

Primus Telecom

PowerNet Global

Access One Inc.

Splice Communications

Acceris

Whatever business application you need met be sure to consider what tier your available bandwidth providers are in your purchasing decision. Ignoring this factor in your deliberations may result in less than optimum implementation and satisfaction in the end. Make a smart business decision.....leave nothing to chance.

What's The Difference Between Tier-1-Tier-2-And Tier-3 Bandwidth Providers To Your Business?
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Michael is the owner of FreedomFire Communications....including DS3-Bandwidth.com and Business-VoIP-Solution.com. Michael also authors Broadband Nation where you're always welcome to drop in and catch up on the latest BroadBand news, tips, insights, and ramblings for the masses.

Easily Find Business Fax Numbers Using a List

How often have you complained to your colleagues about how hard it is to find business fax numbers? The fact is, finding the right business fax numbers can be a real pain especially if what you are looking for are numbers belonging to companies in a specific industry. Yet, the solution to such a problem is relatively simple. All you need to do is to simply acquire a list of business fax numbers from a listing company over the internet. With this, you can now easily find numbers without the pain you used to face in the past.

The first step to solving the pain associated with finding business fax numbers would be to acquire a list of business fax numbers from one of the many listing companies located on the internet. Generally, these companies are involved in the business of data collection and maintain a large database containing contact information of businesses throughout the United States. It is important, however, that you critically evaluate each of these companies by reading reviews posted on forums as well as the relevant testimonials before making your purchase. For those who do not have the luxury of going throughout this process, a good listing company to start with would be one at MailingListUsa which maintains a regularly updated database of business fax numbers throughout the Untied States.

Fax

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The next step you would need to take upon acquiring such a list would be to categorize the business fax numbers contained within your list. A good method of categorization would be to sort these numbers in accordance to the various industries in which these businesses participate in. This is extremely important as it would allow you to find the right contacts easily when you need them. Make sure that your categorization system is as detailed as possible as you would definitely wish to maximize your returns when it comes to launching a fax marketing campaign for your business. Having a loose system of categorization often results in inefficiency as your faxes often gets sent out to the wrong target audience. As such, it is important to maintain a well-classified business fax numbers list.

Easily Find Business Fax Numbers Using a List

Last of all, you should also ensure that you purchase a business fax number list only when you are about to use it. Unlike other things, information pertaining to these numbers gets obsolete relatively quickly. This is due to the very nature of contact information, which tends to change from time to time. Thus, it is important to purchase such information only when you require them. While classification is necessary for convenience, up-to-date information is important in ensuring the relevance of such information to your business's marketing efforts. After all, sending business fax to numbers which no longer exist is in fact a waste of much precious time and effort.

Clearly, getting a business fax number list is important in order to allow you to be able to easily find business fax numbers when you need them. The time and effort that you save as well as the convenience that you gain are in many ways, priceless.

Easily Find Business Fax Numbers Using a List

Chris Burns is an authority on mailing list services providing valuable advice on using Business Mailing Lists. Click Here to learn more about the services that he provides.

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