Some hosting companies provide a single Tier 1 Internet provider, which will work fine as long as your end-user is connected to an ISP that uses that same Tier 1 provider. If not, the connection may have to travel through several other intermediate companies that have what are called piering arrangement with each other -- your streams may get there, but all of these diversions may cause packets to be lost. While lost packets can be tolerated on slower applications such as web pages and email (the packets are just sent again), with audio and video streams there is often not enough time to re-send packets before skips and pauses occur. The best way to handle this situation is by using a bandwidth provider that uses several Tier 1 carriers called Border Gateway Protocol or BGP. BGP directs streams to their destination using the best carrier to get it there in the shortest amount of time. You can find out more about BGP on the
BGP Experts website.
