Hi All, My name is Todd Braning, I work on the technical side of the BandCon house. I am afraid Paul's email is inaccurate. Here are a few facts: BandCon offers transport services that can be configured as unprotected or protected. If you buy an unprotected circuit, and the underlying transport has issues, your VC will have issues. However that is not the case if you purchase a protected service. BandCon does not "just slap all your locations into one big VLAN and let unknown unicast flooding and MAC learning sort it out". All circuits are provisioned as separate point to point MPLS VCs. We do, in fact, utilize traffic engineering and do not oversubscribe our wavelengths. Regarding our NOC. It is true that in the past, our NOC was sub par. This is no longer the case. About a year ago we replaced all NOC technicians, brought in an experienced NOC manager and have made significant progress. Paul - I cannot find you in our customer database so I am not sure what services you bought from BandCon. However, I would be happy to speak with you, or anyone else interested, regarding the technical merits of our transport services. If anyone is interested, please contact me. Thanks, Todd Braning
In a former life, I used Bandcon for point to point transport between POPs. We did not use them for IP Transit. I found Bandcon to be professional, responsive, and their technical design and delivery quality very high. Problems were extremely rare, and when they occurred they were dealt with promptly. I won't get involved in a point by point debate, as Todd seems to have set the record reasonably straight and I trust happy customers will step up to the plate, but I found them to be a positive vendor that stuck to their contracts and delivered what they said they would deliver. -alan On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 1:43 PM, tb <tbraning@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi All,
My name is Todd Braning, I work on the technical side of the BandCon house. I am afraid Paul's email is inaccurate.
Here are a few facts:
BandCon offers transport services that can be configured as unprotected or protected. If you buy an unprotected circuit, and the underlying transport has issues, your VC will have issues. However that is not the case if you purchase a protected service.
BandCon does not "just slap all your locations into one big VLAN and let unknown unicast flooding and MAC learning sort it out". All circuits are provisioned as separate point to point MPLS VCs. We do, in fact, utilize traffic engineering and do not oversubscribe our wavelengths.
Regarding our NOC. It is true that in the past, our NOC was sub par. This is no longer the case. About a year ago we replaced all NOC technicians, brought in an experienced NOC manager and have made significant progress.
Paul - I cannot find you in our customer database so I am not sure what services you bought from BandCon. However, I would be happy to speak with you, or anyone else interested, regarding the technical merits of our transport services. If anyone is interested, please contact me.
Thanks,
Todd Braning
On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 4:43 PM, tb<tbraning@gmail.com> wrote:
My name is Todd Braning, I work on the technical side of the BandCon house. I am afraid Paul's email is inaccurate.
Yo Todd! It's good to hear that you've listened to feedback and made these key operational operational changes. I wish you the best of luck going foward. Please keep in mind that I wasn't trying to smear your company, but rather provide the original poster with real-word feedback on a particular vendor whose customers I've worked with many times over. It would be great if you could stay on the list and join us in future discussions. Keeping things topical for the NANOG list, could you tell us a little more about BandCon's transport offering as relates to backbone policy? Is IP transit traffic preferenced over your PWEs, or the other way around, or are they both FIFO'd? What TE, QoS policy, and signaling/congestion controls have you deployed to deal with multiple customers purchasing 10G pipes and competing for access to a single 10G path between metros? Do you have a general policy on oversubscription ratios you'd be able to share without going into NDA'ed territory? Also on-topic, I know a lot of community members have voiced RECENT concern with the relentless tactics of your sales force, some of it bordering on CAN-SPAM violation and criminal harassment. Could you speak a little bit to what you're doing to bring this under control? Would it be a problem if people mail you off-list with any specific problems they've encountered there? Drive Slow, Paul Wall
Hi Paul, As stated in my last post, I am happy to discuss the technical merits of BandCon’s products with any individual. However, I think most here will concur, this is not the proper platform for such discussions. On a personal note, I have been an active NANOG participant for over 10 years and don’t see that changing anytime soon. -Todd Braning On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 9:05 AM, Paul Wall<pauldotwall@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 4:43 PM, tb<tbraning@gmail.com> wrote:
My name is Todd Braning, I work on the technical side of the BandCon house. I am afraid Paul's email is inaccurate.
Yo Todd!
It's good to hear that you've listened to feedback and made these key operational operational changes. I wish you the best of luck going foward. Please keep in mind that I wasn't trying to smear your company, but rather provide the original poster with real-word feedback on a particular vendor whose customers I've worked with many times over. It would be great if you could stay on the list and join us in future discussions.
Keeping things topical for the NANOG list, could you tell us a little more about BandCon's transport offering as relates to backbone policy? Is IP transit traffic preferenced over your PWEs, or the other way around, or are they both FIFO'd? What TE, QoS policy, and signaling/congestion controls have you deployed to deal with multiple customers purchasing 10G pipes and competing for access to a single 10G path between metros? Do you have a general policy on oversubscription ratios you'd be able to share without going into NDA'ed territory?
Also on-topic, I know a lot of community members have voiced RECENT concern with the relentless tactics of your sales force, some of it bordering on CAN-SPAM violation and criminal harassment. Could you speak a little bit to what you're doing to bring this under control? Would it be a problem if people mail you off-list with any specific problems they've encountered there?
Drive Slow, Paul Wall
On Jul 10, 2009, at 12:05 PM, Paul Wall wrote:
On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 4:43 PM, tb<tbraning@gmail.com> wrote:
My name is Todd Braning, I work on the technical side of the BandCon house. I am afraid Paul's email is inaccurate.
Yo Todd!
It's good to hear that you've listened to feedback and made these key operational operational changes. I wish you the best of luck going foward. Please keep in mind that I wasn't trying to smear your company, but rather provide the original poster with real-word feedback on a particular vendor whose customers I've worked with many times over. It would be great if you could stay on the list and join us in future discussions.
Keeping things topical for the NANOG list, could you tell us a little more about BandCon's transport offering as relates to backbone policy? Is IP transit traffic preferenced over your PWEs, or the other way around, or are they both FIFO'd? What TE, QoS policy, and signaling/congestion controls have you deployed to deal with multiple customers purchasing 10G pipes and competing for access to a single 10G path between metros? Do you have a general policy on oversubscription ratios you'd be able to share without going into NDA'ed territory?
Most excellent questions. Do you have this information for other providers? I guarantee much of the rest of the community would like to know these factoids for the large backbones around the world? Or were you just banging on Todd 'cause your first flame fizzled? :)
Also on-topic, I know a lot of community members have voiced RECENT concern with the relentless tactics of your sales force, some of it bordering on CAN-SPAM violation and criminal harassment. Could you speak a little bit to what you're doing to bring this under control? Would it be a problem if people mail you off-list with any specific problems they've encountered there?
Here we agree. Todd, if you, or anyone, can fix that, we would all be appreciative. If not, it's likely the answers to Paul's previous paragraph won't matter as Bandcon will wither on the vine. -- TTFN, patrick P.S. Sorry if I'm being a little mean to "Paul", but if you don't have the guts to flame from your real name, you don't deserve mercy, or politeness.
participants (4)
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Alan Hannan -
Patrick W. Gilmore -
Paul Wall -
tb