Bruce, On 10/21/2011 11:19 AM, Bruce B wrote:
For those of solely relying on DID from a VoIP provider, can you provide me some info for the last two years as to which provider had no interruptions in service at all and which ones had 3 or less? I am currently dealing with Vitelity and if I am not wrong they get service from XO Communication who in turn has had multiple outages in the past few years.
Unfortunately, your question is somewhat unanswerable, as currently posed. But to illuminate why, some exposition of where DIDs come from is necessary.
Feeding much of the top of this supply chain are several first-tier nationwide CLECs such as Level3, XO, and GX. Because they are interconnected as CLECs in every or almost every LATA, they have the ability to offer origination and termination in virtually any first or second-tier US market, although they certainly specialise differently. GX and XO mostly deal only in very urban markets, whereas Level3 famously has a famously large origination footprint, as a vestige of its managed modem access network. They also get direct end-office trunking out of every end-office in which they have codes, including many end-offices we would consider firmly second tier.
They are somewhat oligopolic from a strictly urban point of view, but they also specialise in somewhat different markets outside of "NFL cities". This is reflected in their pricing.
The second rung in this hierarchy are hybrid aggregators such as Broadvox and Bandwidth.com. Both of these companies started out as resellers of aforementioned Tier 1 origination/termination, and to a large extent, that's still what they do. However, they have started building out their own CLEC in certain high-volume metro markets. When they give you "on-net" pricing, that's what they mean; it's part of their interconnected CLEC holdings. Bandwidth.com in particular used to be a pure Level3 resale play, but has become a CLEC in certain markets to turned up its own switching capacity. The general tendency is for these entities to grow their CLECs and take more stuff on-net, but only in very select, high-volume and high-growth metro markets where the cost and overhead of being a CLEC makes sense for their gross margins.
The other thing these middle players do is strike a lot of direct access relationships with local and regional LECs, although in dense metro markets, it's usually just more economical to go through one of the big CLECs because of the volumes at which they're buying from them anyway.
The traditional distributive function that these guys played with respect to their resale of the majors was that the latter required very high commitments, but with progress and the economic situation being what it is, they've become a lot better at delivering somewhat smaller transactions. However, the second rung retains a significant pricing advantage even when selling you Level3 routes, say, because of the volumes at which they're buying from someone like Level3. They also have cost advantage in certain markets that comes from direct local access relationships with smaller CLECs and some rural LECs.
The important thing to understand is that all these guys are densely peered and sell each other's routes and origination to you. They will deliver what they can on-net, and procure the rest elsewhere. Sometimes their pricing is transparent about that, sometimes it's not, but that's what they do. Origination and termination are subject to a great deal of aggregation and resale. In a way, it's almost like debt instruments.
Physically, the network architectures of both the first and second category operators vary a great deal. Some of them have highly distributed topologies that keep most failures rather localised or regionalised, while others have very edges and backhaul traffic to relatively centralised core routing network elements. There is an entire continuum of technical and economic tradeoffs in these design variations.
Importantly, all of them have outages. Every one of them. That's normal and unavoidable. Even if their own gear were 100% perfect, a million things can go wrong on the counterparty side of a CLEC, say. Tandem trunk exhaust, POI problems, backhoe, slow LERG updates for CLEC homing info on the part of ILECs and wireless majors, etc. That's all par for the course. And of course, they can't much control what happens off-net, which still accounts for a great deal of what they have to sell you if you're buying nationwide footprint.
In the case of a CLEC, the fundamental unit of physical interconnection is the LATA, so at the very least, you need to parameterise your question with a locale. It's rather unintelligible to talk about an entity interconnected in almost every LATA in holistic terms. Somewhere, in some rate center, XO is probably having an outage right now -- that doesn't make them unreliable. The question is whether it's in your rate center(s), how often it's in your rate center(s), and whether it's for reasons that are genuinely avoidable, especially by them.
The next rung are pure wholesale and retail ITSPs that have no carrier facility of their own; they just buy from the first and second constituencies. The general problem, to which a great deal of discussion on this list is devoted, is the enormous variation in quality among service providers that fit into this category. It is often--though by no means necessarily--that their infrastructure is the weakest link in what you ultimately buy.
There is a lot of aggregation and blending that happens at this level, too. An ITSP as large as Vitelity almost certainly procures origination from multiple sources in order to maximise reach. It's highly unlikely to be as simple as "Vitelity uses XO", although, it is common enough to have a preponderant origination partner in order to simplify, streamline and homogenise management and fulfillment of DID orders. I don't know the particulars in the case of Vitelity.
All this to say: everyone has outages, accounted for by a dizzying plethora of reasons. At the scale at which most of the commoditised inputs into the ITSP supply chain operate, to talk about one as being materially more "reliable" than another, in some cosmological, holistic way, is somewhat sophistic.
The most you can really hope for is some proposition like "BruceTel seems to have a lot of problems with flaky media gateways in Bowling Green, KY".
-- Alex -- Alex Balashov - Principal Evariste Systems LLC 260 Peachtree Street NW Suite 2200 Atlanta, GA 30303 Tel: +1-678-954-0670 Fax: +1-404-961-1892 Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/ -- _____________________________________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
