carrier comparison

Eric Flanery (eric) eric at flanery.us
Thu Feb 6 21:57:02 UTC 2014


Vlade,

When you say that "they still advertise your routes", do you mean:

A: That you were having them originate your routes, and they failed to stop
doing so when they had problems? Or...

B: That routes you were originating continued to be propagated by them,
even though your session with them was down? Or...

C: Something else.

I ask, as we are considering some cheap Cogent bandwidth in the
not-too-distant future, to allow us to keep commit rates low on higher
quality connections. 'A' wouldn't be a real problem, since we run our own
AS and originate our own routes; 'B' could be potentially devastating.


On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 8:04 AM, Vlade Ristevski <vristevs at ramapo.edu> wrote:

> We have had Cogent over Verizon's Fiber for more than a few years now.
> Cogent goes down once at year at minimum. They had 2 outages in a single
> day a couple days ago in Northern NJ.  One in the AM "..caused by a power
> outage in a vendor data center where Cogent is collocated." They went on to
> have another outage at around 9:30 PM on the same day for which I'm still
> waiting for an RFO. During this outage, they still were advertising our BGP
> routes so we didn't fail over to our 2nd provider. I notice that happens
> alot with them. When they go down, they still advertise your routes.
>
> As far as price goes, for us Cogent is cheap but Lightpath is cheaper.
>
> Our college is kind of far from things so we don't have a lot of outside
> fiber coming. The last mile fiber for both of our connections are different
> from our Internet providers. I've never had a big issue with the two
> working with each other. The only issue we had is I suspected we weren't
> getting as much bandwidth as we paid for. They had to work out where the
> policer and/or bottle neck was. This is the only issue we had in 5 years
> with this set up and it got resolved. IME, when there is a full outage,
> it's always been clear who the responsible party is.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 2/6/2014 10:17 AM, Adam Greene wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>>
>> We're a small ISP / datacenter with a Time Warner fiber-based DIA contract
>> that is coming up for renewal.
>>
>>
>> We're getting much better pricing offers from Cogent, and are finding out
>> what Level 3 can do for us as well. Both providers will use Time Warner
>> fiber for last mile.
>>
>>
>> My questions are:
>>
>> -          Will we be sacrificing quality if we spring for Cogent?
>> (yesterday's Cogent/Verizon thread provided some cold chills for my spine)
>>
>> -          Is there a risk with contracting a carrier that utilizes
>> another
>> carrier (such as Time Warner) for the last mile? (i.e. if there is a
>> downtime situation, are we going to be caught in a web of confusion and
>> finger-pointing that delays problem resolution)?
>>
>> -          How are peoples' experiences with L3 vs TWC?
>>
>>
>> Although I assume everyone on the list would be interested in what others
>> have to say about these questions, out of respect for the carriers in
>> question, I encourage you to email frank opinions off list.
>>
>>
>> Or if there are third party tools or resources you know that I could
>> consult
>> to deduce the answers to these questions myself, they are most welcome.
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Adam
>>
>>
>



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