From: Gregory Boehnlein
Good morning, I'm considering dropping Cogent completely out of my transit mix, as the number of outages and problems they have been experienced over the past year has reached an unacceptable level. It has gotten to the point that we their BGP session is shutdown for longer periods than it is on. Based on the availability of on-net fiber in my facility, I have narrowed the field to the following candidates:
1. Level 3 2. MCI/Verizon 3. AT&T
I'm looking for comments from actual customers of the above providers in relation to;
1. Network reliability and performance 2. Responsiveness to outages 3. Proactive notification of network maintenance
95% of our traffic mix is US48 in nature, so International routes are not a huge decision point.
We've got connectivity to all three of those plus Cogent and TWTC. Similar to what someone else posted, a much smaller percentage of our web hosting traffic seems to naturally prefer the other providers compared to Level 3. In some cases this has appeared to be forced as testing has shown other paths to be optimal in speed/delay, so we've forced traffic to some ISP's out through other providers manually rather than going over the L3 link. We still send the bulk of the traffic over L3 though as they are optimal in many cases and very reliable. In order of reliability, it's been Level 3, AT&T, UUNet, TWTC, Cogent with all providers being in use with us for at least 18 months. Level 3 and AT&T have always been very responsive and I've had success getting someone who knows BGP rather than a delayed call back. Never actually called UUNet since the few outages there have been have all been short enough that we just disabled the session for a bit and brought it back up with no issues so I can't say with experience how they actually are, although since I have never needed to call that is a good thing. If you're single homed probably best to find out more on their support if you were going to use them. TWTC I've had some issues with community filtering rules that we need dropping out with no warning and multi-hour delays getting someone who could help. Cogent, with their unusual inbound/outbound peering setup, seems to have an issue with their outbound side of our link regularly, every few weeks, while the inbound session has been up for 460 days. I also dislike their very poor community offerings, we can't do many of the things with them that we do with the others. We keep them and prepend three times on our advertisements to them so they are primarily just a link for traffic going to and from other Cogent customers. If the pricing is right, I think you'd be happy with either L3 or AT&T, probably MCI/Verizon/UUNet (or whoever owns them this week) too provided their support is good since we have found them to be pretty reliable. Dave