Least Sucky Backbone Provider

Mon Nov 5 16:03:35 UTC 2007

We had the same issues with Cogent .. I feel your pain...

level(3) has always been good for us - very few issues and their support
has been great from our perspective.

MCI/Verizon did not work well for us at all - their network was solid
and customer service wasn't too bad ... our problem was that less than
20% of our traffic was preferred via MCI's routes.  Funny how one of the
largest networks in the world was the least attractive BGP wise....   of
course everyone's network is different with every provider so YMMV....

Never dealt with AT&T as we're based in Canada...;)

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
Gregory Boehnlein
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2007 10:52 AM
To: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Least Sucky Backbone Provider

Good morning,
	I'm considering dropping Cogent completely out of my transit
mix, as the number of outages and problems they have been experienced
over the past year has reached an unacceptable level. It has gotten to
the point that we their BGP session is shutdown for longer periods than
it is on. Based on the availability of on-net fiber in my facility, I
have narrowed the field to the following candidates:

1. Level 3
2. MCI/Verizon
3. AT&T

I'm looking for comments from actual customers of the above providers in
relation to;

1. Network reliability and performance
2. Responsiveness to outages
3. Proactive notification of network maintenance

95% of our traffic mix is US48 in nature, so International routes are
not a huge decision point.

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