CAIS/Ardent and now Network Access Solutions

Thu May 30 18:44:13 UTC 2002

CAIS sold our account to NAS. They did this about 5 months back. They are
just now getting around to cutting us over. This involves Covad making some
changes in their switch somewhere.

Back last May, it was PSINet that was selling our account to CAIS. They sent
us an e-mail to announce that they were taking over the account and sent us
a list of the account details that they had for us. The information was
wrong.
I sent them corrections. Also made sure they knew that we had our own IP
addresses and to be sure to coordinate the BGP stuff with PSI when cutting
over.

They didn't. PSI kept announcing the routes. Ardent didnt announce them. It
took me FIVE DAYS to get them to fix it. Waited on hold for 45 minutes more
than
7 times and finally talked to brain dead drones on the other end each time.
No
luck. Finally wheedled the PSI NOCs direct number out of someone on the
phone at
PSI and called them. They dropped the route announcements for us. Then it
took three more days to get in touch with someone at Ardent. I was able to
do
that by posting a message here. One of their engineers called me and we had
it fixed
in ten minutes.

Fast forward to Dec/Jan 2001/2002: Now, CAIS (called Ardent now) sold us
to Network Access Solutions (NAS). We have been paying them ever since Dec
or so. Two months ago, they sent the same kind of e-mail: "We'll be cutting
over your connection soon, please fill out this questionnaire, etc". I did
so,
and wrote a long tome at the end warning them not to mess up the BGP stuff.
"It
couldn't be that bad twice, could it?" I though to myself. I crossed my
fingers. In
their e-mail, they told me that they would soon get back to me with a
cutover
date.

This afternoon, at 4:40PM, I got the message "Your cutover date/time is
5PM-8PM Eastern May 29, 2002 (today)" and "The date cannot be
changed".

Also they said "If you have your own IP addresses", it may take till
midnight till the routes propagate (Now I know I'm in trouble - 5pm till
midnight?).

No sooner did I read the message than the connection went dead. Not the
circuit, just the BGP announcements.

Its now 7AM Eastern time. We've been offline 13 hours now. Phone drone at
NAS says "Hmm, your not listed on our cutover sheet today". I put two and
two together: They told Ardent "drop the routes today at 5" and then lost
the paperwork internally so the cutover did not happen, but Ardent dropped
the
routes. Just got off the phone with them again after sitting on hold for 45
minutes. They dont seem to get the message that its a BGP problem and not
the circuit.

Last time, when we had problems, some kind engineer from CAIS
sent me e-mail and offered to help and, like I said, he got us back online
in, like 10 minutes. If you're out there, please let me know. I need your
help again
Please reply to jpp at well.com as the e-mail on this message is not accessible
at this time.

Sorry to bug all of you with this. Let see: 13 hours and running. Last time
it was five days. Wanna take bets on how long this time? Funny thing, when I
called
CAIS afterwards to ask them how they were going to "make it up" to me for
knocking me offline for five days, I was sent to the voicemail of some
customer
service manager who never returned my calls. Lets see how well NAS does.

John