Choosing an ISP

1
Choosing an ISP

• Ken Goodwin
• Pittsburgh GigaPoP

2
Pre-Request for Proposal
3
Analyze your needs

• Develop an idea of your bandwidth needs
• Be honest!
• Most people overestimate their bandwidth needs
  sometimes by more than a factor of 10!

4
Who is your communications community

• Branch offices (mostly)
• Small community of users
• who is their provider?
• US-centric
• Global

5
Why is your community important?

• When the Internet went public, public Network
  Access Points (NAPs) were established.
• NAPs are a meeting place for the ISP backbones.
• They provide a way for a customer of one ISP to
  transit their ISP to reach a customer of another
  ISP.
• MAE-East, MAE-West, Sprint NAP

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Why is your community important?

• These public NAPs quickly became overloaded.
• Private Peering Points were created
• Traffic exchange points that are set up by two
  ISPs at their expense to privately handle traffic
  on infrastructure that they can control/upgrade
• If you have a small community, try to choose the
  same ISP as most of your community

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Why is community important?

• more control over quality of service problems
• If your community is diverse, choose the ISP with
  the best peering relationships.
• This information is difficult to get and requires
  a non-disclosure agreement.
• Or choose one of the larger ISPs.
• Or many ISPs

8
Why is community important?

• Information on the number of routes is slowly
  becoming available.
• Interesting research project
• http//www.caida.org/analysis/topology/as_core_net
  work/
• Not perfect, but is attempting to quantify the
  size of ISPs backbones or connectedness

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Needed Services

• Other services offered by ISPs.
• DNS, WWW hosting
• Dialup
• Multicast, Virtual Private Networking
• Quality of Service
• QoS means many different things, so be specific

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Other Services

• Customer Premise Equipment (CPE)
• ISP will provide and manage router and other
  necessary connection equipment
• Backup links
• ISDN
• Shadow Links
• Network address space

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Other Services (cont.)

• Local Loop
• circuit that connects you to either the ISP Point
  of Presence (POP) if local or to a long distance
  carrier
• Can be bundled as part of ISP bid, or you can get
  your own.

12
Service Level Agreements

• Range of options
• Circuit uptime percentage guarantee
• Easy to implement and becoming more common
• ISP backbone transit delay
• ISP backbone loss limit

13
Service Level Agreements

• These typically add extra cost to the connection
• Can make negotiations and operation more
  difficult
• Decide what you really need

14
Finding ISPs

• Most telephone companies
• computer magazines have articles/reviews
• www.boardwatch.com
• recommendations
• competitors

15
Selection Criteria
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Core Services

• Basic
• Backbone speed v. link speed
• Oversubscription
• What is their backbone upgrade policy
• How do they respond to workload/performance
  issues?
• Are their services (WWW,DNS) reliable and fast
• updates and response

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Core Services

• Community
• Do they directly connect to all or most of your
  community
• If not, how heavily do they rely on public
  interconnects
• If global, what are their global interconnects

18
Security

• Preventive measures
• Anti-spoofing Make sure that packets coming from
  customers have customers source addresses.
• Routing Sanity Does the customer access router
  to the backbone only accept routes from the
  customer that the customer owns?

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Security

• NOC access Is there a list of authorized
  customer contacts, passwords, etc. so that NOC
  personnel know that the caller is an authorized
  customer contact?
• Response
• Will they install filters, track attacks, etc.

20
Price

• Connectivity is not free!
• Good connectivity is not (necessarily) cheap!
• Price is negotiable!
• Longer term contracts yield better pricing.
• Ask for many pricing options in RFP.
• Different terms, with and without local loop, etc.

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Types of Pricing

• Tiered Service
• Pick a bandwidth amount and pay a fixed fee.
• Limits are placed on the circuit (if needed) to
  limit the traffic to the chosen bandwidth.
• Burstable Service
• Pick a bandwidth and pay a fixed fee
• Can burst over the chosen bandwidth to the limit
  of the circuit.

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Types of Pricing

• Burstable Service (continued)
• If you burst too often, you will be automatically
  moved to that level of bandwidth and charged
  accordingly
• Metered Service
• Have access to the full bandwidth of the circuit.
• Charged for each byte of data that is sent.

23
Types of Pricing

• Compare the pricing.
• While burstable or metered may sound like it will
  save you money, it may not.

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Acceptable Use Policy

• An AUP is a way for the ISP to control the
  content of your traffic.
• Used to deal with SPAM, pornography, etc.
• Make sure that your traffic will comply
• If you have customers who are putting their own
  traffic on your connection, make sure you are not
  held wholly responsible for their AUP violations.

25
Network Operations Center

• These are the people that help you when your
  connectivity is broken or bad.
• Consider the skill level of your staff and of
  their staff
• If you have a small/inexperienced staff, make
  sure the NOC can be a posivitive help
• If you have a very experienced staff, see if
  there are ways to bypass the first level call
  takers.

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RFP Checklist

• Bandwidth Level
• Additional Services
• DNS, WWW, CPE
• Private Peering Relationships
• Backbone Map
• Upgrade Policy
• Service Level Agreements

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RFP Checklist (cont.)

• Pricing for various terms and types
• Security Policy
• NOC Description
• Acceptable Use Policies
• References

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Post RFPContract Stage
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Contracts

• Local loop - who provides and at what cost
• Length of term
• Installation costs
• Upgrade options - in contract with pricing
• Outage recourse - refunds
• Response time
• if problems are not resolved, escalation
  procedures

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More Contract Issues

• Installation date
• Pick a mutually agreeable date and put it in the
  contract
• May want to have penalty clauses if they do not
  meet this date.
• Any SLAs
• AUP

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Operations Procedures

• Circuit numbers
• Phone numbers for NOC, services ,etc
• E-mail addresses for the above
• Escalation procedures