Bandcon

keith tokash ktokash at hotmail.com
Thu Jul 9 23:28:06 UTC 2009


We've run our circuits pretty hot and not noticed anything that would indicate a lack of shaping/policing.  And while the flame war with the attrition guys was pretty funny (I'm a sucker for classics) I wouldn't really use that as any type of barometer of ... well anything really.  This email may be accurate, but I'll pretend I'm an engineer for a moment and ask for something to back up allegations before I believe them.  Even with the internet's stellar reputation for accuracy via intuition.





---

Keith Tokash, CCIE #21236

Network blah blah blah, Myspace.com







-----Original Message-----

From: Paul Wall [mailto:pauldotwall at gmail.com]

Sent: Thursday, July 09, 2009 11:50 AM

To: Robin Rodriguez

Cc: nanog at nanog.org

Subject: Re: Bandcon



On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Robin

Rodriguez<rrodriguez at ifbyphone.com> wrote:

> I don't have any usage experience, but would be very interested from anyone

> who does as well. We have spoken with them about long-haul circuits (with

> small to no commit) and their prices are indeed incredible. The prices we

> heard were for Equinix to Equinix circuits (specifically CHI1 & CHI3 to DAL1

> & NJ2) they also quoted us great deals on resold IBX-link to get to IBX's

> that they don't have a physical presence in (they aren't in CHI3 for

> example). I do wonder how they can undercut everyone's price by such a

> margin. Were you seeing great quotes into non Equinix facilities?



Simple, they're oversubscribing their transport circuits and letting

users fight for

bandwidth. Basically what they're doing is buying a 10GE unprotected wavelength

from a carrier, dropping a switch on the ends, and loading up multiple customer

VLANs onto the circuit. There are no bandwidth controls, no

reservations, no traffic

engineering, nothing to keep and the circuit uncongested, and these

are unprotected

waves so they go down on a regular basis whenever their carrier does a

maintenance.

How they implement multi-point service is even scarier, they just slap all your

locations into one big VLAN and let unknown unicast flooding and MAC

learning sort it

out. Most serious customers run screaming, I'm sure you can find some former

customers who can describe the horror in more detail off-list.



When things break, their support is nothing to write home about.  They

often brag that they have a former Level3 engineer on payroll,

unfortunately he's nowhere to be found, and their suport people aren't

terribly sharp on those rare occasoions when they *do* answer the

phone or respond to e-mail.  Like someone else pointed out, multi-day

outages aren't at all uncommon, so if you end up going with Bandcon,

make sure you have sufficient redundancy in place.



Since they can't really compete on quality, they compete instead on

price.  Their sales force spams and cold-calls every website, ARIN,

peeringdb, etc on a regular basis, and can't take "no" for an answer.

The following exchange sums it up nicely (warning: foul language):



http://attrition.org/postal/z/034/0931.html



They are currently running a $2.50/mg transit promotion, which makes

me wonder how they're doing on their Level3 and Global Crossing

bandwidth commits and whether or not they're solvent.



Drive Slow,

Paul Wall










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