Tier 1 network

(redirected from Tier 3 network)

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ARPAnet was the original Internet backbone, which was superseded by the National Science Foundation Network (NSFnet) in the late 1980s.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.

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Tier 2 and Tier 3 network operators in North America will quickly abandon further investment on Sonet-based optical transport products in favor of emerging packet optical transport systems, and investment in optical transport gear by smaller operators will peak over the next two years, according to a major new report from Heavy Reading (www.heavyreading.com), the research unit of TechWeb's Light Reading (www.lightreading.com).