Finding information about metro private line service in downtown SF

Thu Oct 28 02:37:13 UTC 2004

I have used PacBell's GIGAMAN service at a number of locations.  Its
basically "managed" fiber running GigE.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu]On Behalf Of
Bill Garrison
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 7:32 PM
To: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Finding information about metro private line service in
downtown SF

Hello,

I am investigating the options for linking up a new office to our
(coincidentally) close datacenter in downtown San Francisco.  Both
locations are SOMA and within about 10 minutes walking of each other.

Calling SBC provided me with a rather clueless person telling me all
about ATM, Frame Relay and other options I don't want.  To his credit,
I believe I may have been defining what I want incorrectly.

Since both areas are well within the same LATA (do people say that
anymore?) I am simply looking for some sort of private line service be
it fiber or copper.

Who are the providers local to the area?  Is there any way of finding
what is in the ground around me? (I know UPN Networks is in between
our offices so I am confident there is fiber or copper all around us.)

What are the easiest options for this sort of thing?  What kind of
pricing might we be looking at?

To give some perspective, we push a significant amount of bandwidth
through our datacenter such that if the costs work out we would prefer
a private line into our datacenter (for many reasons including cost,
internet speed in the office, ability to have a backend entrance to
our network for "offsite" backups, etc.).  We would also then just
setup a DSL line or T1 for emergencies/failover.[1]

Please reply offlist, thanks for any insight,
Bill

[1]: Our alternative is too just get a T1 with a DSL for manual
failover but piping into our datacenter would provide a substantial
number of benefits. (this is a small office with about 10 people all
of whom can handle cold-swapping to DSL if ever needed...)