Hello all, I think I've given everyone enough time to chime in on this one. I only got a handful of replies, and they are mostly in favor of Telehouse. I also heard from a Telehouse rep, who states that there is a project in progress to connect NYIIX to TelX. No details yet. I don't think there's any TelX people on this list. The company I'm working for (not inch.com, btw, that's just my email address) that is looking to leave L3 is small. One person noted that Telehouse has "every Tier 2 provider in NYC", and I find that small companies work better with other small companies. To Level3, we are a complete nobody. Smaller guys like NAC that are at Thouse are much easier to work with, IMHO. Since there were not too many replies, here's a summarized version of the responses. If anyone has anything to add, I'd love to hear it. Thanks very much to all of those that replied, I appreciate your input. Charles ----- Telx is the nicest thing in 60 Hudson, but it's still 60 Hudson... Telehouse by FAR. ----- For a company like you, Telehouse is the best bet. TelX has a lot of voice carriers and "super-large" carriers. Telehouse has numerically more, but smaller carriers. But the biggest difference is attitude. With TelX, expect to pay for everything. There's no cheap crossconnects in TelX, and they can charge you 2000$/mo for optical crossconnect. In Telehouse, its ~500$ onetime fee. If you are on 5th floor of Telehouse (where there's raised floor), Telehouse doesn't mind if you run your own crossconnects in the same room. That alone saved me few thousand of dollars (even 250$ onetime for a crossconnect quickly adds up once you do certain projects). Telehouse has IIX, which can offload 10-15% of your traffic. That all being said...If you looking to do international stuff - go with TelX, that's where its at. If you are looking to do voice, go with TelX. If you looking to do IP - go with Telehouse. If you decide to go with TelX, keep in mind, that if you take up space in meet-me-room, you'll be charged less for crossconnects than if you just take space from someone in caged area.

I'm mainly curious about the variety of transit providers (both seem a bit slim), how hard it is to get sublet customers in, and the reliability of power/cooling.

Its more about attitude. Telehouse is friendly. TelX is stuck up and aiming to suck out most money out of you. Out of big boys: Verio, XO, cogent, MFN/above are in Telehouse. GX/L3/UU are not. They are in 60 hudson, but, they aren't necessarily in TelX. If they aren't in TelX, expect to pay min 700$/month in-building loop charges for fiber crossconnect. Pretty much every 'tier 2' carrier in NY is in Telehouse. ----- Go to Telehouse. TONS more peering there. Plus, no recurring xconnect fees. :-) And we are there! ----- I am in both. Suposedly, NYIIX is being extended to Tel-X. [...] Telehouse is better in almost every regard, ranging from no re-occuring fees on x-c's, amount of providers, etc. Tel-X didn't have a _UPS_ until a few months ago.

We're currently at Level3, and their x-connect fees are making a number of projects too expensive.

See above. -----

I'm getting some extremely negative feedback about TelX so far.

Why not just go to Telehouse. Talk to davis@telehouse.com . You should know her. She's good people. She'll take care of you. The place is still stupid, but its gotten better, and they don't test the generator against live stuff anymore. ----- I've been pretty happy with TelX service. The colo cages are generally well laid out, and cross-connects are pretty simple. They will *strongly* encourage you to install patch panels for cat-5, co-ax, and fiber (whichever ones you use) to their meet-me area, but once that is taken care of, it's generally 1 day to get cross-connects completed. You will have to pay time & materials for cross-connect orders, but as long as you already have the patch panels to the meet-me area, you don't pay MRC on the cross-connects. The staff is generally helpful, if not always extremely clueful, but they have done very competant remote-hands work for me in the past when I had problems that required manual intervention. Access to the space is generally not onerous, as long as you have the people authorized on their list. Getting access to 60 Hudson in general can be a bit of a problem, but if the folks are authorized on the TelX list, the front desk will permit access after verifying with TelX. I've never had a problem with cooling in TelX, but we have had two power problems in the past 9 months. The power problems were both very short, sub 1 second, and appeared to be caused by a phase mis-match when they were bringing additional power capacity on-line. (It only affected about 1/3 of our non-UPSd equipment, but would have driven me crazy trying to figure out what caused it had I not been there and seen the lights flicker.) I do know that TelX has installed a huge amount of backup power in the past 6 months. I'm not sure exactly how many transit providers are in TelX, but there are a number of MAN providers selling very cost-effective ethernet access, which gives you access to almost any transit provider in NYC, though it is more expensive than an internal cross-connect. -----