Sprint Cellular: The Final Insult
We used to have five phones with Sprint. Two months ago we dropped them after six months of trying to get them to bill us for our plan. The bills had been consistently 50% - 100% over what we expected. Each time they were apologetic and a refund was issued. The final straw was an hour long call with a very helpful Sprint person who told me their internal systems were such a mess it was 'almost impossible' for them to provision a customer correctly if the customer had added phones as we had done. Her attempts to fix the problem only made the next month's bill worse. I spoke with someone at Sprint, told them we weren't going to put up with it any more, canceled our service, and told them they needed to have someone contact us to sort out how much of the $1,400 bill we actually owed. No one ever contacted me. A written complaint of a similar nature sent to their headquarters has also gone unanswered. Today I received a collection notice - not only the additional $1,400 due but they apparently failed to cancel our service on the basis of that call and let two more months of billing @ $300/month accumulate before placing the debt for collections. Our expected monthly rate was $175/mo and this 40% overcharge was fairly consistent with our experience with Sprint when we were a paid up customer. I can at this time wholeheartedly recommend against ever using Sprint's cellular service. We liked the service itself and bent over backwards trying to get the billing problems resolved, but they seem to be relentlessly incapable of managing their own internal systems in such a fashion as to provide good customer service. I have not yet read their 10Q/10K filings but when I see stuff like this on my own account and many other Sprint customers confirm that they've had similar experiences I have to wonder how well the company is doing financially. I see this collection notice and I imagine I am going to go ahead and pay the bill eventually, but this matter is going to be bitter pain for Sprint before I'm done. Sprint investor relations is the only visible receiver of this email but I know that a great many of you are like me - owners of businesses that might purchase cellular service, or technical staff in a position to influence such purchases. Perhaps a few of you are even more like me in that your given to writing the occasional freelance article in the telecommunications arena. I figure this email alone is worth maybe $200,000 in negative advertising for Sprint. That is a nice start, but I feel the urge to keep going. I'm going to pay the $2,000 I owe Sprint, but the only source of funds for this bill will be articles I write about this matter and sell to the various trade journals. My own story is frightful, but it'll be an easier sell if I've interviewed a few other victims. If you're smarting from Sprint's incompetent handling of billing please feel free to drop me a line and tell me all about it. Neal Rauhauser
Nanog subscribers to pull down 2 megabytes a day, continuously ... of one thread
Its the Energizer Bunny thread of 2007 ... 135 messages so far and still going strong. Steve Sobol wrote: On Sat, 13 Jan 2007, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: My experience is that when you show people VoD, they like it. I have to admit the wow factor is there. But I already have access to VoD through my cable company and its set-top boxes. TV over IP brings my family exactly zero additional benefits.
RFQ: IP service in U.K. for U.S. hosting company
Ladies Gentlemen, A while ago I posted some questions about transport from the U.S., peering in London and received very good technical feedback from this group. We've determined that the best option for our problem is not peering, but the purchase of service from a provider with a good network in the U.K. and on the continent. We'd like to receive proposals based on this requirement. The customer has equipment colocated with Sprint fiber in Champaign Illinois and this appears to be the only sensible route out of their network. Existing IP service is from Sprint and McLeod. The current network is cisco 7507s and we don't envision any changes here beyond an upgrade from RSP4 to RSP8 at some point in the future. We expect to receive a DS3 level interface but based on traffic we think we'd need perhaps one third of its total capacity. Feel free to email me if you need more information. -- mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] // IM:layer3arts voice: 402 408 5951 cell : 402 301 9555 fax : 402 408 6902
U.S./Europe connectivity
I am doing some work on a network in central Illinois that is currently peering with Sprint and McLeod. They have a number of customers in the U.K. and they want to reduce latency to that part of the world. They've been offered a point to point 100 mbit link between their facility and a location in London from Cogent, but this isn't IP service. They've asked me to sort out how they can use this link or to find a good alternative for them. A long time ago I think Teleglobe peering would have been the snap answer for European connectivity, but its been a few years. Who would I look to in terms of a carrier on that side of the pond? We've got on net termination with Sprint as a starting point for a link ...
Re: U.S./Europe connectivity
Lior, No, this is very helpful. We just turned up AdventNet's Net Flow Analyzer for this customer's two production cisco 7507s and we should be able to see where the European customers are very shortly. It is good to know that Cogent is a decent choice for this job - we've seen not so positive stuff about them here in the past. If we can narrow things down to Cogent and Level 3 right away that is a good place to start. Someone sent me to peeringdb.com and it looks like I have plenty of places to choose from in London. Neal outageslist outages wrote: Hi, few strong links in Europe and specially UK are: COGENT, LEVEL3, CW,TELEFONICA COGENT win most of our US links to Europe even better than LEVEL3, but i would not be surprise if LEVEL3 win most of the links to the UK. for sprintlink, from Caribbean CW goes to sprintlink Miami and from there to telefnoica even though there's a path through cogent/LEVEL3. in terms of connectivity inside telefonica i am not happy with, alot of latency for too many places, and alot of failures around Spain(i assume telefonica is spanish) CW is very strong in UK, as well as LEVEL3 and cogent. but this is not enough to come to any conclusion, so i would start by analyzing ip scopes where most of the European clients are connecting from and run some BGP queries and traces. and checking up sprintlink peering to differenet london locations. hope it's not too vague and it gives you anything useful, Lior On 12/5/06, nealr [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am doing some work on a network in central Illinois that is currently peering with Sprint and McLeod. They have a number of customers in the U.K. and they want to reduce latency to that part of the world. They've been offered a point to point 100 mbit link between their facility and a location in London from Cogent, but this isn't IP service. They've asked me to sort out how they can use this link or to find a good alternative for them. A long time ago I think Teleglobe peering would have been the snap answer for European connectivity, but its been a few years. Who would I look to in terms of a carrier on that side of the pond? We've got on net termination with Sprint as a starting point for a link ...
Cogent and Sprint peering history?
I've not watched here closely for a number of years, but I now have a Sprint connected customer who is hating life and Cogent seems to be part of the equation. Can someone fill me in on the history of their relationship? I never thought Sprint would ever renew its relationship with Sprint: Tracing the route to portus.netsecdesign.com (66.6.208.6) 1 sl-bb24-rly-9-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.14.122) 0 msec 0 msec 0 msec 2 sl-st22-ash-6-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.20.189) 0 msec 4 msec 0 msec 3 p15-2.core01.iad01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.13.61) [AS 174] 4 msec 4 msec 0 msec 4 v3492-mpd01.iad01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.3.222) [AS 174] 16 msec 80 msec 196 msec 5 v3497.mpd01.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.5.65) [AS 174] 4 msec 4 msec 4 msec 6 t9-3.mpd01.iah01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.2.222) [AS 174] 44 msec 44 msec 48 msec 7 t2-3.mpd01.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.3.186) [AS 174] 72 msec 72 msec 72 msec 8 g2-0-0.core01.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.2.101) [AS 174] 72 msec 72 msec 72 msec 9 g49.ba01.b002698-1.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.250.12.130) [AS 174] 72 msec 72 msec 72 msec 10 PAJO-Networks.demarc.cogentco.com (38.112.9.190) [AS 174] 72 msec 76 msec 72 msec 11 dcap04.pcap.lax01.tierzero.net (216.31.128.14) [AS 11509] 72 msec 76 msec 72 msec 12 mmic-gw.dcap6.lax.us.tierzero.net (216.31.188.94) [AS 11509] 76 msec 80 msec 80 msec 13 dazedandconfused.netsecdesign.com (66.6.208.4) [AS 11509] 84 msec 84 msec 88 msec 14 portus.netsecdesign.com (66.6.208.6) [AS 11509] 84 msec 84 msec 88 msec Next I will see pigs flying :) Wonder how long it will last based on Cogent's past behavior as noted here. Edward Ray - This mail was scanned by BitDefender For more informations please visit http://www.bitdefender.com -
Cisco SLA data access via SNMP?
Ray, Do you have an example of accessing the SLA data via SNMP? I've just got interested in those things, I've found the OIDs required, but its all a bit of a maze ... I could really use some jitter information in a couple of places right about now ... Neal Ray Burkholder wrote: If you have Cisco routers on either end, use the built in SLA capability. It will give you ongoing abilty to trace latency, loss, jitter. It won't tell you bandwidth, but will give you a set of metrics for traffic quality. Do a full mesh between all your edge devices and it might help track where in the middle your issues reside. The SLA tools are pretty standard to Cisco devices and so should give you an edge in getting people to listen to you. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of J. Oquendo Sent: Wednesday, November 15, 2006 16:20 To: Kuechel, Mark Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Network Connectivity... Dealing with Providers Kuechel, Mark wrote: Sounds like you are trouble shooting a VoIP issue several networks removed from the actual user. First step is to get into their network via telnet and start from there. Is this a jitter issue on some or all calls? Has the customer done a traffic study on their own LAN to see if there is not some sort of congestion there? Pings from afar are not used to trouble shoot issues in depth: Lots of posting on this. Has the clients Bandwidth utilization been looked at to their provider? Give us more. Pings and traceroutes weren't the only tests I've done. Here is my capacity when dealing with this client: When something happens and I need to do some VoIP related stuff (extension changes, etc), I mainly log in via SSH from one of four points, a DSL connection CTTEL, Level3, GBLX, and Verio. When my lab's CTTel DSL connection fails I jump on a DS3 (GBLX), when that fails, I jump on to a machine in Texas and most of the times one of them is going to let me in. Now, I have had failures from two points to all points at sporadic times. So I do the obvious traceroutes, pings, etc.. Now a provider can be quick to tell me check your line but come on now... 4 different lines are failing to connect here. (This doesn't include the fact that if I can't get in... What makes you think voice data is getting in?) So, for my testing, I'm doing a functional (its fugly) test from all four locations to my client, and from my client to all four. My data is going to be a collection of ping tests, traceroute test (tcptraceroute), bing test, etc I was hoping to get feedback on other tools... I have Radarping as well but don't feel like using it. I want to be able to leave something running 24x7 until Friday. I'd like for it to be opensource so the provider doesn't cry your network voodoo tools don't count!. I want to be able to go back and say Listen these tools are industry standard tools from CAIDA (or elsewhere), and they're used by engineers all across the board. I've done a fair test and its obviously coming from your network.. So to answer your bandwidth question, bandwidth (according to the provider) is under 50% capacity with sporadic spikes as their engineers have seen while on the phone with them. Sporadic means nothing to me. I have a 63% packet loss which means even if I was equipped with an OC768, the bandwidth means nothing if the packets aren't going through. Here's your Lamborghini Murcielago Sir. It does 200mph. Although from time to time you'll only do 126mph... Traffic internally, I've put on QoS maps, but with or without them same errors occur. It's not an issue of echoes, its more of calls to specific DID's dropping, not going through, caller can hear - receiver can't. All the while some lines work, others don't. Couple this with my Nagios test going bonkers - I configured Nagios to monitor from my client to Google, Yahoo, MSN and I can see loss from here to the outside world so it's twofold. Short of my client running me over with his FX45, I'm even running out of patience with my client's provider. -- =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ J. Oquendo echo @infiltrated|sed 's/^/sil/g;s/$/.net/g' http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=getsearch=0x1383A743 How a man plays the game shows something of his character - how he loses shows all - Mr. Luckey -- Scanned for viruses and dangerous content at http://www.oneunified.net and is believed to be clean.
Re: UUNET issues?
I'm fairly sure I'm not the only one who's said this in the last (pick a months long period of time, I'll guess 6): Could you be any less descriptive of the problem you are seeing? Ya know ... this whole descriptiveness thing has to be my biggest pet peeve. I have a couple of things going at any given time and I just *love* when I get an email entitled can you fix this? Bad enough when its a customer, worse when its the guys I work with - the best response to these sorts of things coming from an internal address is maybe and don't elaborate :-) They either take the hint and put a proper title on it with a cc: to our project manager, or they fix it themselves.
sorbs.net contact?
I see from the archive that there is someone on this list who is a contact for sorbs.net. Please contact me offline as soon as possible. No, forty eight hours isn't going to cut it. Thanks :-) -- mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] // IM:layer3arts voice: 402 408 5951 cell : 402 301 9555 fax : 402 408 6902
