Experiences with Comcast Ethernet/Transit service

Fri Jan 8 14:52:07 UTC 2010

I've found them to be quite sufficient here in the PDX metro area. They
support all L2 tunnels, in particular, QnQ which I require. We have diverse
paths, multiple strands and multi-colored. We are a bit of a special case as
we are serviced by a group that is intended for government and education
which gives us pricing breaks. The commercial shots I have out to meet-me
POPs are priced diffrently. Their CPE devices are migrating to Cisco ME3400,
etc. devices. Their tiered pricing is based on link speed which I'm not
necessarily pleased with but they're starting to become more flexible. They
aren't currently honoring our P-tags so our locations that may be
oversubscribed have difficulty with priority queueing. Their new core in our
area is a single C 7.6k. I would rather they moved from their older F Big
Iron to a J MX or C GSR, but I'm sure the group that services us is faced
with limited resources (ref pricing breaks earlier). The customer portal
provides custom/customer views on their Orion instance which I find even
more useful than my own Cacti graphs at times. The engineering staff is very
accesible (again our group is unique). I'd like to see them put gear in more
colos and hotels. Their uptime and reliability from my perspective has been
right on target.

-b

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 11:40 PM, Brent Jones <brent at servuhome.net> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 1:10 AM, Brandon Galbraith
> <brandon.galbraith at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We're looking at using Comcast's (business) transit and private ethernet
> > services at several client locations and I wanted to see what experiences
> > others have had regarding this. Off-list replies are preferred.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > -brandon
> >
> > --
> > Brandon Galbraith
> > Mobile: 630.400.6992
> >
>
> This was a timely question, as we've have a GigE fiber line with them
> for 6 months now.
> Largely, the link performs at ~999Mbit 99% of the time  :)
> However, we've had two issues with connectivity that seem to originate
> from their network. The link will show up, but both sides of our fiber
> will show 0 frames received, and lots of transmit errors. It takes a
> call into the Comcast NOC each time for them to resolve it, but
> they've been silent on what may actually be going on. These
> interruptions last anywhere from 30 minutes, to the last one almost 7
> hours (luckily over a weekend).
>
> Benefits to this, being Metro Ethernet, they do support tagged VLAN's,
> so cost to entry is low in terms of equipment and setup/support.
>
> Our link goes between downtown Portland, OR, to across the river to
> East Vancouver and Mill Plain.
>
> --
> Brent Jones
> brent at servuhome.net
>
>

-- 
Bill Blackford
Network Engineer