Subject: Any enterprise operators very happy with their MPLS providers? Date: Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 02:14:25PM +0000 Quoting McCall, Gabriel (Gabriel.McCall@thyssenkrupp.com):

I'm getting ready to prepare an RFP for our next generation WAN, and would like feedback from anyone else who has 100+ MPLS nodes on their quality of account service and technical performance.

My current landscape includes AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. I'm almost completely happy with Sprint- they're about in the A- range. AT&T is muddling along at about a C, and Verizon is a solid F. I've heard very good things from some CenturyLink customers and will definitely include them in the bidder list- is anyone else doing a very good job for you?

We did a survey around 2008-9 in Sweden and concluded that the risk of large hysteresis IPDV and Q-in-Q outweighed the attractiveness (mainly price) of running on top of somebody elses MPLS. A major contributing factor was, and is, also that we ourselves are running MPLS for our logical separation needs, and that we predicted and got a lot of real-time critical RTP streams on the internal WAN. We bought "Gigabit Ethernet compatible channels" over mainly dark fiber or WDM and included text in the call for tender about not even trying to offer MPLS-based L2.. This was done under EU Public call for tender legislation, which was a challenge. We are quite happy, and slashed our old inflated price for relatively small SDH links by a lot. If, OTOH, you are not a very distributed radio company trying to do RTP in 48kHz 24-bit linear stereo over internal WAN, using multicast, you might be fine with a MPLS offering... -- Måns Nilsson primary/secondary/besserwisser/machina MN-1334-RIPE +46 705 989668 I have a VISION! It's a RANCID double-FISHWICH on an ENRICHED BUN!!