On Nov 9, Benjamin Scott claimed:
> FWIW, six months ago, we agreed with you (and we're one of their
> resellers!). But about four or five months ago, Vitts finished a major
> network upgrade. They scraped the stupid Cabletron wide area Ethernet backbone
> they were using, and replaced it with an honest-to-God, layer 3, routed IP
> backbone. (Or so they say, anyway.) Since then, their performance has been
> flawless. The improvement really has been dramatic.
Perhaps, though at least two of the folks I'm familiar with switched away
within the past month because of continued trouble. This included things
such as dropped packets, slow response, increasingly frequent 5-10 minute
periods of downtime. One of the folks that experienced this would call us
up and ask if we could take a look for them - we'd traceroute from our
end, and have them do likewise and the stopping point was (almost) always
one of Vitts' routers.
Then again, these particular people just switched over to Conversant. Now
THAT is a really odd network setup. (I'll elaborate if anybody has
interest).
> They guarantee 99% availability. That includes better then 50 ms round trip
> time to their Internet access point, and better then 5% packet loss.
Yeah - when we were on them, they made that guarantee as well. In fact,
they went as far as to say that any month where they did not have 99%
uptime we did not have to pay for service. Over the course of about 18
months, I think we ended up having to pay for only one or two months. I
will say that this did happen before the network "fixup" that you just
mentioned.
> If you
> unplug your DSL NTD, ten minutes later, your phone will ring, with a Vitts
> tech on the line asking if everything is okay.
Sorry to disagree again, but that certainly wasn't the case with the folks
that just switched to Conversant. They would have a half hour downtime
(15 mins or so to realize it, another 10-15 to call us and have us take a
look) at which point either they or we would call Vitts. They did not
know about the downtime when called...
> They also don't turn up their nose at you if you're using Linux, which is a
> big plus for us, as we deploy a lot of Linux servers on Vitts DSL lines in
> SOHO and small business situations.
This was one plus that I do have to agree with. I also do have to say
that any of the field techs we ever dealt with were quite personable.
-Cole
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