Bandcon

Thu Jul 9 18:49:41 UTC 2009

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Robin
Rodriguez<rrodriguez at ifbyphone.com> wrote:
> I don't have any usage experience, but would be very interested from anyone
> who does as well. We have spoken with them about long-haul circuits (with
> small to no commit) and their prices are indeed incredible. The prices we
> heard were for Equinix to Equinix circuits (specifically CHI1 & CHI3 to DAL1
> & NJ2) they also quoted us great deals on resold IBX-link to get to IBX's
> that they don't have a physical presence in (they aren't in CHI3 for
> example). I do wonder how they can undercut everyone's price by such a
> margin. Were you seeing great quotes into non Equinix facilities?

Simple, they're oversubscribing their transport circuits and letting
users fight for
bandwidth. Basically what they're doing is buying a 10GE unprotected wavelength
from a carrier, dropping a switch on the ends, and loading up multiple customer
VLANs onto the circuit. There are no bandwidth controls, no
reservations, no traffic
engineering, nothing to keep and the circuit uncongested, and these
are unprotected
waves so they go down on a regular basis whenever their carrier does a
maintenance.
How they implement multi-point service is even scarier, they just slap all your
locations into one big VLAN and let unknown unicast flooding and MAC
learning sort it
out. Most serious customers run screaming, I'm sure you can find some former
customers who can describe the horror in more detail off-list.

When things break, their support is nothing to write home about.  They
often brag that they have a former Level3 engineer on payroll,
unfortunately he's nowhere to be found, and their suport people aren't
terribly sharp on those rare occasoions when they *do* answer the
phone or respond to e-mail.  Like someone else pointed out, multi-day
outages aren't at all uncommon, so if you end up going with Bandcon,
make sure you have sufficient redundancy in place.

Since they can't really compete on quality, they compete instead on
price.  Their sales force spams and cold-calls every website, ARIN,
peeringdb, etc on a regular basis, and can't take "no" for an answer.
The following exchange sums it up nicely (warning: foul language):

http://attrition.org/postal/z/034/0931.html

They are currently running a $2.50/mg transit promotion, which makes
me wonder how they're doing on their Level3 and Global Crossing
bandwidth commits and whether or not they're solvent.

Drive Slow,
Paul Wall