VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, [5], 6, 7, 8 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 15:54:19 07/02/01 Mon
Author: Jessica
Author Host/IP: 216.201.21.117
Subject: ISPs.... Moving this up, because more than one person may want this info...

Okay, let me start from the beginning.

Basically there is one rule of thumb when choosing your ISP that most people don't know about. That rule is: Your ISP is only as good as their ISP. Stinks, yes?

What this means is:
There are only TWO companies in Ohio (why Ohio? because I live here and that is all I know...) that actually create their connection. Those companies are UUnet and Sprint. These are known as Tier 1 internet service providers (because they create their connection and have a redundant backbone.)

Unless you recieve your connection (in Ohio, that is) from either of those companies, you are possibly pulling from a company that gets their connection from a company gets their connection from a company that gets their connection from UUnet. Which makes your company a Teir 4 provider.

What does this mean for you, the end user?
This means that your "high speed" internet connection is leaving your house (say, when youre trying to pull up a website), going through company one, to get to company two, then from company two to get to company three, going from company three to get to UUnet, then when it gets to UUnet it leaves and goes through all of the companies that the website provider uses (may be up to 5 or more), and then through all those steps all over again in reverse order to transfer the website information back to your PC. By the time you see a web page, your connection has lagged so much that you are sitting on the other end of your PC recieving 56K modem speeds off of your $40 a month DSL or Cable modem (if you are on 56K you would be pulling NO MORE than 1K a second). *snoring loudly*

The thing that is sad to me is that even though the scenario I gave is normal and the way MOST internet companies run, the company can *still* turn aaround and say "We have a T1! We have HIGH SPEED INTERNET ACCESS!" What does this mean to you?? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, because I have been in situations like the scenario I illustrated above, and recieved 56K modem speeds ON A T1 because of all of the "hands" my connection had to pass through before it got to it's destination and back.

Also, most companies, when asked if they are a Teir 1, Teir 2, Teir 3, etc. ISP, will dance around the issue and say, "It depends on what you mean by Teir 1." (Yes I have had that response before, grrrr. WHAT DO YOU THINK I MEAN?! LOL!)

How to make this work for you:
Most of us work for a company that has a network admiinistrator, right?? ASK THEM. Ask them to "ping" your prospective ISP. What this means, is your network admin will "ping" your prospective ISP using a software that will return a report on exactly how many "hands" your connection had to pass through in order to get to its final destination complete with reports on the amounts of time in miliseconds it took at each stop.

If your network admin doesn't have the software, if you don't have a NA, or if you want to try to ping them yourself, let me know and I will try to get the name of the software for you. (I cannot use it because I use Macintosh and they dont make the software for the Mac, I had to have my network admin ping my ISP from his PC.)

Hope this helps!!!

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.