Tier 1 network
Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Medical, Legal, Financial, Wikipedia.
Tier 1 network
A top-level network on the Internet. There are 16 Tier 1 networks worldwide. In the U.S., AT&T, CenturyLink, GTT, Verizon and the Zayo Group are Tier 1. Germany, U.K, France, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Italy, Spain and Sweden host the non-U.S. networks.Known as "settlement-free peering," Tier 1 networks are private networks that allow traffic from other Tier 1 networks to transit their backbones without a fee. See peering and IXP.
Tier 2 and Tier 3 Networks
Tier 2 networks peer with some networks without fees but pay to reach a large portion of the Internet. Tier 3 networks always pay fees to obtain access to the larger backbones.
ARPAnet to NSFnet to Tier 1
ARPAnet was the original Internet backbone, which was superseded by the National Science Foundation Network (NSFnet) in the late 1980s. NSFnet was replaced by Tier 1 networks in the mid-1990s when the Internet became a commercial venture. See ARPAnet, NSFnet and Internet.
Copyright © 1981-2019 by The Computer Language Company Inc. All Rights reserved. THIS DEFINITION IS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. All other reproduction is strictly prohibited without permission from the publisher.