Evaluating Tier 1 Internet providers

[bryan at serverstack.com (Bryan Socha)]

To add some more from recent experiences..  Most of these are in colocation
datacenters.

- speed to handle your emergency support call.     (recent experience, some
tier1 can take a couple hours)

- if support requires a portal opened ticket, is the staff to reset a
password also 24/7.

- Latency in your region.    (recent experience: I removed 4 circuits
because the backbones weren't the same in different areas).

- Is you location a pop, metro ring or dedicated fiber elsewhere.

- To get more specific, where is their peering in relationship to you.
Strong peering not near you could mean a lot of extra latency just to get
off their network.

thanks,
Bryan Socha