SaidCom disconnected by Level 3 (former Telcove property)

Fri Mar 16 01:25:28 UTC 2007

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, Frank Bulk wrote:

>
> http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/articlePrint.cfm?id=1310151
>
> Is this a normal thing for Level 3 to do, cut off small, responsive
> providers?

Even from that one-sided account, I have serious problems with:

  Siwert said the Colorado-based Level 3 "cited several Internet
  abuses" by SaidCom customers as the reason for the shutdown, including
  spam problems. "Some customers abuse the system", but when that
  happens, SaidCom contacts the authorities, said Siwert.

When we have a customer spamming, we don't call the police.  We either 
talk to, ACL, or shut off the customer.  The above suggests to me that 
SaidCom had spam issues that they were either unable or unwilling to 
remedy themselves.

I also doubt that L3 shut them off without multiple prior warnings, though 
anything's possible.  We had an issue many years ago where a leased line 
provider (coincidentally borged indirectly into L3) shut off all of our 
services with no warning at all on a Friday evening.  Only after wasting 
some time with their NOC troubleshooting the circuits were we told we'd 
been shut off for non-payment.  When we eventually got to the bottom of it 
(many hours later), it turned out they had another customer with a similar 
name that was way past due...and when billing told their NOC shut off 
"Atlantic" they shut off everything that looked like "Atlantic" even 
though we were two totally separate and unrelated customers.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jon Lewis                   |  I route
  Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
  Atlantic Net                |
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