SaidCom disconnected by Level 3 (former Telcove property)

Thu Mar 15 21:36:17 UTC 2007

Not knowing anything about the case other than what I read in the 
article, my hang up is that a transit provider can make a phone call 
and destroy a customer's business with 30 minutes notice.  On a DS3 
that has actual real lead time to replace, that's a business killer. 
The argument of "should be multi homed" holds some water, but I've 
never considered multihoming as a typical remedy for a 30-90 day 
outage.  And then it only works if lines are underutilized to the 
point of loosing one will constantly have zero affect on network 
performance, even during peak use, and if there's still some level of 
extra redundancy remaining.  (Multiple contingency situations aside)

My opinion is probably somewhat influenced by the fact that I'm a 
small ISP with customers that want the internet to NOT be slow, 
facing that same DS3 lead time problem.  I ordered a DS3 in early 
December, (who's local loop was to ride on a preexisting OC3, sounds 
easy, right?) and with dates slipping over and over again, and with 
no firm install date in site provided from the company last week, I 
had to finally cancel and order with a different company last week. 
For the last month, the last thing I wanted to do was "punt" and 
start the process over again, but at some point, one starts to feel 
"choiceless."

"Do you think I placed that order in December just for fun?"

I see talk over and over again on NANOG about "Maybe some provider 
will come in with [insert new technology here] and compete with the 
cable/DSL providers" but as a small provider doing fix broadband 
wireless, I just don't see how even an army of small providers can 
compete against the likes of TENS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS of 
cable/telco market capitalization.

After fighting Qwest for ten years, maybe I'm starting to feel a 
little hopeless.