Market 1 ISPs

[sat_mad]

Hi,

Something that I've always pondered...

If a telephone line is on a Market 1 exchange where broadband providers have to lease the line from BT, what aspects influence the performance between the various ISPs? 

[Steve]

I think it's how the individual ISP's run their own network ie do they have sufficient capacity to permit high performance to most users. especially at peak times. Or do they work on a more limited model where contention is high and rate limiting and port blocking are a feature of their networks at busy times.

[pctech]

It will depend on:

1) How many hostlinks they have coming in from BT (I gather there are 1Gbps and 10 Gbps options), how near to capacity these are (how many connections are terminating over each link, the utilisation of these connections (is the connection being used for something link P2P 24/7) and the speed the connections are running at (downstream and upstream) and whether prioritisation is applied by BT on behalf of the ISP (generally for business connections)

2) The capacity of the internal links between network elements, whether traffic management is used and on what protocols and what the speed is capped to.

3) The capacity of the external peering and transit links (peering refers to connections such as those to the London Internet Exchange where ISPs rent switch ports and arrange settlement free exchange of traffic usually where the traffic is remaining in the same country) whereas transit is chargeable based on the volume of traffic sent over the link and is used for traffic on longer routes for example from the UK to the States.

[sat_mad]

Right, I see - well, after a bit of of time on Google and Wikipedia I do!

I've always wondered what the ISP's role was in the supply of broadband, and what made each unique.

Thanks for the info. 

[pctech]

There are ISPs that offer 'white label' network services for other companies to resell without those companies having to build and operate a network (Gamma Telecom and Entanet are two examples of companies that offer this service to others).