Least Sucky Backbone Provider
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 had the same issues with Cogent .. I feel your pain... level(3) has always been good for us - very few issues and their support has been great from our perspective. MCI/Verizon did not work well for us at all - their network was solid and customer service wasn't too bad ... our problem was that less than 20% of our traffic was preferred via MCI's routes. Funny how one of the largest networks in the world was the least attractive BGP wise.... of course everyone's network is different with every provider so YMMV.... Never dealt with AT&T as we're based in Canada...;) Paul -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Gregory Boehnlein Sent: Monday, November 05, 2007 10:52 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Least Sucky Backbone Provider 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The information transmitted is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and contains confidential and/or privileged material. If you received this in error, please contact the sender immediately and then destroy this transmission, including all attachments, without copying, distributing or disclosing same. Thank you."
Have only had experience of Level3 & MCI/Verizon in the UK I prefer Level3 due to the following... Scale of the Network Host lots of big content providers across the Globe Very few outages (1 in 12months) on the UK backbone Customer support was very good Always an account manager to assist with any issues. Hope this helps Stephen Bailey - Lead Technical Services Specialist IS Network Services FUJITSU Services Fujitsu Services Limited, Registered in England no 96056, Registered Office 22 Baker Street, London, W1U 3BW This e-mail is only for the use of its intended recipient. Its contents are subject to a duty of confidence and may be privileged. Fujitsu Services does not guarantee that this e-mail has not been intercepted and amended or that it is virus-free. -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Paul Stewart Sent: 05 November 2007 16:04 To: Gregory Boehnlein; nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: Least Sucky Backbone Provider We had the same issues with Cogent .. I feel your pain... level(3) has always been good for us - very few issues and their support has been great from our perspective. MCI/Verizon did not work well for us at all - their network was solid and customer service wasn't too bad ... our problem was that less than 20% of our traffic was preferred via MCI's routes. Funny how one of the largest networks in the world was the least attractive BGP wise.... of course everyone's network is different with every provider so YMMV.... Never dealt with AT&T as we're based in Canada...;) Paul -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Gregory Boehnlein Sent: Monday, November 05, 2007 10:52 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Least Sucky Backbone Provider 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- "The information transmitted is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and contains confidential and/or privileged material. If you received this in error, please contact the sender immediately and then destroy this transmission, including all attachments, without copying, distributing or disclosing same. Thank you."
On Nov 5, 2007, at 9:51 AM, Gregory Boehnlein wrote:
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.
There can still be problems over peering links between your new Stable Carrier and some Unstable Carrier. If such a problem affects your traffic, then you may want to tell your carrier not to advertise your prefixes to the Unstable Carrier at all, which you can do using redistribution/traffic engineering communities. If your Stable Carrier doesn't support these, and your tolerance for pain is less than theirs, then you may even have to shut down your connections to Stable Carrier to keep Unstable Carrier's problem from affecting your own customers. So who supports these communities? A cursory reading of www.onesc.net/communities says: -L3 supports TE-community-based prepends to all its peers (?) -Savvis to Tier-1s plus Cogent, XO, Telia -GBLX to Tier-1s plus Cogent, XO, Telia -Telia Sonera to Tier-1s plus Cogent, XO, TWTC -Qwest to Tier-1s plus XO -Sprint to Tier-1s -XO to some Tier-1s (lacks Qwest, NTT) Networks which may not support redist/TE communities: Verizon NTT/Verio AT&T TWTC Cogent (let me know if I'm in error) These communities are useful when there are networks that (A) are unstable, and (B) carry/send important traffic to your network. I'd look for support of traffic engineering via redist. communities when shopping for a "stable" carrier. Bradley
On 2007-11-05-10:51:58, Gregory Boehnlein <damin@nacs.net> wrote:
I'm considering dropping Cogent completely [...]
Always a good idea.
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
As Vijay reminds us time and time again, engineering a large, reliable, network isn't particularly difficult these days. Indeed, none of the candidates you name above suffer from major reliability problems.
2. Responsiveness to outages 3. Proactive notification of network maintenance
All large providers lack in these areas, some more than others. Even with preferred support, it's not uncommon to get asked if you get dial tone on your OC-48, or if 10GE is "like a T1" -- I do, weekly. Plan accordingly. With that in mind, key differentiators I'd focus on when selecting a transit provider include provisioning intervals, tools/automation, routing policy/feature support, and reachability to specific ASNs. I'd summarize the above vendors as follows. Please forgive the rambling, and if you deem any of this off topic, kindly hit the 'd' key and spare us the chatter. (Me personally, I consider vendor reviews and pseudo-arch discussions like this fascinating and acutely on-topic, though I can see where others may disagree...) Level(3) (AS 3356, not legacy Wiltel, Broadwing): All in all, thoroughly "gets it". Robust implementation of inbound and outbound BGP communities; prefix-list auto-generation off IRR; working blackhole community; IPv6 support, though tunneled. Support folk are smarter than average; provisioning times are slower than average. Large collection of "eyeball" customers. Verizon Business (AS 701, formerly UUNET, MCI, et al): Solid as a rock, though beginning to show its age. Supports a blackhole community (kudos to cmorrow, et al, for setting the trend there), though few/coarse others outbound. No inbound communities; 1995 called and asked for its as-path filters back :-). Older equipment (Juniper M40, Cisco 12008 w/ E0-E3 cards, ...) is still common in the edge, thus availability of 10GE customer ports is sparse outside of specific hotels. Presents frequently on, but is not yet equipped to offer, IPv6 customer connectivity. Significant eyeball base, specifically Verizon DSL and FTTx customers. AT&T (AS 7018): Solid connectivity and architecture; sharp folk who are also active in the NANOG community (tscholl, ren, jayb, ...). Significant eyeball base as represented by AT&T (SBC, Ameritech, BellSouth) DSL/FTTx customers and various cable MSOs, though the latter is slowly dwindling. With that said, it is important to realize that their commodity IP product is tailored towards enterprises with leased lines, not your typical NANOG/SP demographic. Accordingly, some friendly advice here would be to lay out your specific requirements (wrt communities, prefix listing, source address verification, IP ACLs, dampening, ...) as a part of the contract/RFP process, lest you might find yourself frustrated by various defaults. HTH, -a (speaking on behalf of himself only)
Adding a bit to this, folks who give their experiences with the transits might want to mention whether they are predominantly an eyeball or content network. For example, our experience with Cogent is the reverse of the original poster's, but we are 90%ish eyeballs. I suspect that might be the difference. Others? John At 12:38 AM 11/6/2007, Adam Rothschild wrote:
On 2007-11-05-10:51:58, Gregory Boehnlein <damin@nacs.net> wrote:
I'm considering dropping Cogent completely [...]
Always a good idea.
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
As Vijay reminds us time and time again, engineering a large, reliable, network isn't particularly difficult these days. Indeed, none of the candidates you name above suffer from major reliability problems.
2. Responsiveness to outages 3. Proactive notification of network maintenance
All large providers lack in these areas, some more than others. Even with preferred support, it's not uncommon to get asked if you get dial tone on your OC-48, or if 10GE is "like a T1" -- I do, weekly. Plan accordingly.
With that in mind, key differentiators I'd focus on when selecting a transit provider include provisioning intervals, tools/automation, routing policy/feature support, and reachability to specific ASNs.
I'd summarize the above vendors as follows. Please forgive the rambling, and if you deem any of this off topic, kindly hit the 'd' key and spare us the chatter. (Me personally, I consider vendor reviews and pseudo-arch discussions like this fascinating and acutely on-topic, though I can see where others may disagree...)
Level(3) (AS 3356, not legacy Wiltel, Broadwing): All in all, thoroughly "gets it". Robust implementation of inbound and outbound BGP communities; prefix-list auto-generation off IRR; working blackhole community; IPv6 support, though tunneled. Support folk are smarter than average; provisioning times are slower than average. Large collection of "eyeball" customers.
Verizon Business (AS 701, formerly UUNET, MCI, et al): Solid as a rock, though beginning to show its age. Supports a blackhole community (kudos to cmorrow, et al, for setting the trend there), though few/coarse others outbound. No inbound communities; 1995 called and asked for its as-path filters back :-). Older equipment (Juniper M40, Cisco 12008 w/ E0-E3 cards, ...) is still common in the edge, thus availability of 10GE customer ports is sparse outside of specific hotels. Presents frequently on, but is not yet equipped to offer, IPv6 customer connectivity. Significant eyeball base, specifically Verizon DSL and FTTx customers.
AT&T (AS 7018): Solid connectivity and architecture; sharp folk who are also active in the NANOG community (tscholl, ren, jayb, ...). Significant eyeball base as represented by AT&T (SBC, Ameritech, BellSouth) DSL/FTTx customers and various cable MSOs, though the latter is slowly dwindling. With that said, it is important to realize that their commodity IP product is tailored towards enterprises with leased lines, not your typical NANOG/SP demographic. Accordingly, some friendly advice here would be to lay out your specific requirements (wrt communities, prefix listing, source address verification, IP ACLs, dampening, ...) as a part of the contract/RFP process, lest you might find yourself frustrated by various defaults.
HTH, -a (speaking on behalf of himself only)
participants (6)
-
Adam Rothschild -
Bailey Stephen -
Bradley Urberg Carlson -
Gregory Boehnlein -
John Dupuy -
Paul Stewart