On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Justin Shore wrote:
Every time we tried to take this position we got the same old line of "we've got everything in the path configured correctly; you'll get the full 200Mbps" to which I'd reply with a reminder that we got the same assurance when we turned up the 100Mbps with them a year prior only to later discover a cap of around 50Mbps somewhere in the middle. Our account team's hands are tied. There isn't anything that they can do about it. I've got it documented in email so if we suddenly flatline again at some percentage under 100% we'll raise an unholy hell with them.
I ran into similar problems with Verizon on a long-haul EPL circuit a few years ago. Speed problems were aggravated by the fact that this was still a very new service for them, so almost none of their NCC folks were trained in provisioning or troubleshooting them. Assuming that L3 provisions circuits like this over a SONET transport, then they're basically bonding four STS-1s into a 200 meg logical pipe. If the bonding and mapping isn't done properly all the way through the system, including the end terminals where the Ethernet <-> SONET conversions happen, then you don't get the full bandwidth. You might also see other odd side effects like unexplainable jitter, occasional retransmits, or other throughput killers. jms