Did Internap lose all clue?

Thu Oct 20 21:03:05 UTC 2011

On Oct 20, 2011, at 4:48 PM, bas wrote:

> Recently I was contacted by an Internap sales person.
> The third line of the email read:
> 
> "As you know well, BGP makes all routing decisions simply based on HOP COUNT"
> 
> I blinked my eyes a couple of times.. Yes it really said hop count.
> Then I replied to the guy that if he tries to sell a technical product
> to technical people he should get his info straight.
> 
> But he replied BGP actually makes decisions based on hop count.
> He even sent an URL from the internap website that states this
> http://www.internap.com/it-iq/route-optimization-miro/
> 
> On that page there is also this gem:
> "BGP relies on the premise that hops are responsible for packet loss
> and congestion, and therefore a route with fewer hops is inherently
> better. "
> 
> 
> I can imagine blatant misinformation like this from a shady startup
> trying to trick some sales with smoke and mirrors, but from Internap?
> 
> 

That's a shame - I had a sales-oriented conversation with a few people from Internap (we are already a customer but this was about other services) and they were very clueful.  This was a few months ago (including some discussions about BGP and their optimization products where their technical sales lead was clueful about how it worked and what it did).

Though, Internap had the NOC who replied to a problem report of mine (where even-numbered addresses weren't pingable in our block via Internap; I used <our prefix>.0, a router loopback,  as an indication of something unpingable which normally is) with "You should expect <our prefix>.1 to respond to ping and such, but not 2<our prefix>.0 as that is only capable of representing a subnet and not a network interface of any kind, or any machine, at all"  