Level 3 - "legacy" Wiltel/Looking Glass bandwidth

Sat Jul 4 15:20:24 UTC 2009

On Wed, 1 Jul 2009, Scott Howard wrote:

> We're looking at getting connectivity via Level 3 in a particular
> datacenter, but we're being told that it's "legacy Wiltel/Looking Glass"
> rather than "true" Level 3.
>
> Given that both of these acquisitions occurred years ago should I be
> worried, or is this "legacy" connectivity the same as L3 at any other
> datacenter?

While I cannot speak directly to their treatment of former Wiltel 
customers, I can tell you that once they acquired Broadwing, service in 
their Norristown, PA data center went from not-so-great to completely 
unacceptable.  IIRC, we've had about 6 multi-hour outages in the past 
year.

Apparently, that data center is connected to their Philly POP via a 
Foundry Big Iron switch that suffers from broadcast storms periodically, 
which can only be fixed by their dispatching a tech to Philly to 
power-cycle it, which for some reason takes from 1 to 4 hours.  Why 
they're not familiar with remote-power cycling equipment is beyond me, let 
alone why they haven't resolved the issue properly, despite having 
supposedly replaced hardware at one point.

My 3 year contract is up next month, after which I am so out of there. 
The fact that L3 tried to double their price on me in the middle of that 
contract, only backing down after getting two lawyers involved, didn't 
help my opinion of them as a company, either.

James Smallacombe		      PlantageNet, Inc. CEO and Janitor
up at 3.am							    http://3.am
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