bandwidth quality?????

[archer]

on various threads i've read people talk about tier 1 vs cogent bandwidth(and how bad cogent is!).

how can a potential customer know what bandwidth a company is really using?

after all...all the companies always trumpet that they use nothing less than the state of the art everything.

[HunkyLuke]

Good question, but of course the answer is not 100% straight forward.

The easiest way you can check what bandwidth provider is being used is to use traceroute to trace the route to your server. However, keep in mind that routes are dynamic and will change often, because most web hosting companies use a variety of bandwidth providers. So you may have to test this over a few days to see various results. That being said, most companies that use cheaper bandwidth (like cogent) tend to push traffic through those routes to save money, so you will likely see that route showing up on your first try.

If you are on a Windows PC, bring up the command prompt (go to the start button, click Run... and then type in cmd in the box and hit OK. That will bring up a black box). On a mac, you need to bring up a terminal window. In the command prompt, type the following:
tracert yourdomain.com
then hit enter. You should see results like this:

C:\Documents and Settings\Luke>tracert nationalnet.com

Tracing route to nationalnet.com [66.115.135.38]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 30 ms 11 ms 10 ms 190.218.0.1
2 10 ms 11 ms 11 ms cm-200-75-201-9.cpe-statics.cableonda.net [200.75.201.9]
3 11 ms 10 ms 11 ms cm-200-75-231-85.cpe-statics.cableonda.net [200.75.231.85]
4 10 ms 11 ms 13 ms pp01-fouf-in.cableonda.net [200.75.200.177]
5 15 ms 11 ms 10 ms cm-200-75-201-185.cpe-statics.cableonda.net [200.75.201.185]
6 13 ms 11 ms 14 ms ge-0-1-0.ar1.pty1.gblx.net [64.209.103.25]
7 68 ms 68 ms 67 ms 204.245.37.218
8 67 ms 67 ms 70 ms 2-3.r1.ny.hwng.net [69.16.191.93]
9 79 ms 88 ms 78 ms 3-1.r1.at.hwng.net [69.16.191.126]
10 80 ms 80 ms 79 ms 209.197.26.210
11 82 ms 85 ms 89 ms gig2-10.tr1.atl4.national-net.com [66.115.128.114]
12 82 ms 85 ms 84 ms nationalnet.com [66.115.135.38]

Trace complete.

This outlines the route that is being used to get from my PC to NationalNet. In my case, my PC is on the cableonda.net network, which goes through gblx (global exchange) to hwng (highwind) to get to nationalnet.

Lets look at a tracert to a known cogent site:

C:\Documents and Settings\Luke>tracert cogentco.com

Tracing route to cogentco.com [38.100.128.10]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 7 ms 8 ms 7 ms 190.218.0.1
2 10 ms 8 ms 7 ms cm-200-75-201-9.cpe-statics.cableonda.net [200.75.201.9]
3 10 ms 11 ms 11 ms cm-200-75-231-85.cpe-statics.cableonda.net [200.75.231.85]
4 11 ms 11 ms 13 ms pp01-fouf-in.cableonda.net [200.75.200.177]
5 10 ms 11 ms 11 ms cm-200-75-201-197.cpe-statics.cableonda.net [200.75.201.197]
6 14 ms 12 ms 10 ms GigabitEthernet4-12.ar1.PTY1.gblx.net [208.50.254.129]
7 74 ms 77 ms 75 ms te2-8.ccr01.jfk07.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.14.69]
8 82 ms 80 ms 80 ms te0-2-0-4.mpd22.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.3.1]
9 86 ms 90 ms 88 ms te0-0-0-2.mpd22.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.5.253]
10 * * 79 ms te4-2.mpd01.iad03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.29.122]
11 88 ms 91 ms 93 ms cogentco.com [38.100.128.10]

Trace complete.

You will notice the first few steps are the same, that because that is the network I am on. But after leaving gblx, I get routed to cogentco which is cogent bandwidth.

If you are able to login to your server via SSH, you can use traceroute to get more accurate results as you are mimicking the same route your content takes to get delivered to your customer (starting at the server and deciding the route to the customer). But not a lot of people have this ability.

Of course, the other option is also to ask your host, if you can trust they are honest (most are).

Hopefully this all makes sense. Let me know if you have any questions or want more info, I am happy to help!

[archer]

kewl. :082502yes_prv:

why is cogent bandwidth so bad, though? why is 'tier 1' so good? isn't bandwidth all the same?

what different kinds of bandwidth are there?

[HunkyLuke]

Cogent used to be really latent (slow to respond) bandwidth that was oversubscribed because they sold it cheap, and was serviced by slow city-to-city connections which tended to get clogged up in peak periods. Also, they had really poor peering, meaning that they connect to other low-quality networks so their international routes were pretty slow.

Tier1 bandwidth is a group of better quality bandwidth providers that provide a complete route themselves (ie, they don't buy routes from others) thus providing better quality control and faster connections, more networks, more peering options, faster routes, etc. This group includes big companies like AT&T, Sprint, Level3, Savvis, UUNet, etc.

Bandwidth isn't all the same. I haven't had my pulse on bandwidth providers in the last few years, but last I heard Cogent was cleaning up their act & investing in bigger & better infrastructure. But, at this point, my knowledge is a few years out of date. Hopefully others here will have some current bandwidth info that they can share too.

[raymor]

Load up some sites using the hosting in question and try to download some
similarly sized videos and look at the speed. After all, you really don't care
who they are buying bandwidth from, you care how fast it is. Bandwidth is always
oversold, and the extent to which it's oversold matters much more than who
it's purchased from.

As Luke said, Cogent used to have higher latency, higher jitter, and lower price -
exactly what you WANT for an adult site. The gap isn't that big any more, though
Cogent is still a "value" provider.

Don't pay to much attention to the words "tier 1". They are almost always "redefining"
the word for marketing purposes, not actually using tier 1 providers. In fact,
Cogent is, or was the last time I checked, a tier 1. That may have changed.
Tier 1 and quality are two different things. Tier 1 basically refers to how big the
company is, as evidenced by the contracts they have with other companies.
AOL may be huge, but that doesn't mean they don't suck.

There are two or three factors in connection quality, as opposed to throughput.
Throughput is measured in Mbps, or GB / month, and tell how MUCH bandwidth.
Latency is a measure of quality, measuring how many milliseconds it takes for a
single packet to get from your server to your customer, or vice versa. That's
important for low bandwidth applications like telnet or SSH, where you want to
send a single keystroke to the server very quickly. Gamers pay attention to
latency because in a fight they want their moves sent to the server faster than
than their opponents moves. If they can react a few thousands of a second
faster than their opponent, they may win the fight.

What's the difference between latency, which is a measure of speed, and
bandwidth, which is also a measure of speed? A fast motorcycle has good
latency, it can get a small package there fast. It's bandwidth sucks, though,
it can't carry much. A semi truck has good bandwidth - it can get a lot of stuff there
today. The truck has bad latency, though, it takes it a while to get moving and
get where it needs to go. Videos are big, so what matters for video and 100K+
images is bandwidth. Latency doesn't matter because you don't care if it takes a
few thousands of a second longer for the video to start downloading. What you
care about is how long it takes to finish carrying all of the video, so you want a semi,
not a motorcycle. So latency isn't that important for adult sites. High bandwidth, at
a reasonable cost, is what you what for video, so Cogent fits the bill nicely.

The other commonly measured part of quality is jitter. Jitter answers the question
"how variable is the latency". That is, if one 4Kb packet takes 30ms, will the next
one also take about 30ms, or will it maybe be quite different, with the next packet
taking 10ms, or 60ms? For web sites, that normally doesn't matter, though it
can affect some types of streaming video. Jitter matters mainly for VOIP and
similar real time applications. It can make a voice "quiver".

What matters more to you is something which isn't a part of wholesale deals.
All web hosts oversell their bandwidth, even if they say they don't. That means
that each of your customers is competing with other people's customers to use
the hosts connection to the backbone. For example, if the host has a 1,000 Mbps
connection and their are 1,000 people using it, each person will download at about
1 Mbs. We can call this the "bandwidth per connection". Right now, we are
testing a third data center and "bandwidth per connection" is a problem with
the new one. They sold us 100 Mbps, and we could use 100 Mbps, if 50
customers were downloading at a time. Each customer only gets about 2 Mbps
per connection. I'm about to contact them and renegotiate, getting connected to
a different switch where each connection can get at least 10 Mbps.

So in summary, Cogent, a value provider, is actually pretty well matched for adult
sites, where you want high bandwidth and low cost, but don't care much about
latency and don't care at all about jitter. Per connection bandwidth is more
important, and is largely determined by to what extent the bandwidth is oversold
and can only be determined reliably by testing.

By the way, don't forget to consider the people you're working with too.
For the infrastructure that runs your business, you probably want people
who really know what they're doing, and many,many web hosts don't know
much about anything but marketing. One of the largest hosts isn't even
allowed to get in the building where their servers are, but instead contracts
all work on the servers to the company that owns the data center. The host,
one of the largest, is really just a marketing company. Ask a perspective host
what the two measurements of bandwidth quality are and see if they immediately
know the answer - "latency and jitter". Ask them how they choose a RAID card
and see if it sounds like they know what they are talking about. "We use brand X"
isn't an answer. The question is "how do you choose a brand, why do you use
brand X". Most hosts will have no idea. That happens to be where we're strong.
We don't have the cheapest bandwidth, but we actually know what the heck we're doing.





Ray