Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Oh, and XO has a lot of their own metro fiber. Not sure of their long haul. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Josh Luthman j...@imaginenetworksllc.com Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 4:31 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Isn't XO a Level3 reseller? Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373 When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. --- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.netwrote: It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering. In the DC and NY markets, Cogent has excellent performance and peering, and has shown to outperform EVERY provider we have tried, period. (And yes, some of the carriers we tried were Level3, XO, and Abovenet.) I recognize that Cogent's performance may not be as good for ALL markets where they potentially could have a weaker presence. But saying Cogent is only worthy of the 3rd or 4th transit connection is simply untrue. Cogent's weak point now is internal processes and communication. They've lost touch with the value of having personal Account Reps, and render the reps powerless to manage the accounts, in favor of the customer relationship managed by the clueless billing/collections department. Its a shame. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. But their tech support has been the best by far in the industry, and oversubscription has never been a problem from what I see. In picking a Transit provider its really a decision about where your traffic typically flows, and where you need good performance to. NOT anyone has best performance everywhere. For example, Hurricane has excellent performance AND they are inexpensive. They have a really good peering presensence in CA. I'm not confident that they have nearly as good a presence on the East coast though, but those that have used them on teh east coast that I know have been happy. We were considering using them. Abovenet has great Gig-E Transport. But their transit is expensive, and its because its more expensive for them to provide it, because they are not as well positioned to do it cost effectively, not because its necessarilly better. Level3 as well, has many strength. They have a lot of web host clients. It can really help performance to reach certain sites. Level3 also tends to blocks smaller BGP block announcements, more so than someone like Cogent. Level3 is good for a secondaryu because they usually have diverse routes. Some providers have good performance to France, Amsterdam, India, others dont. Savvis tends to have real peering to NY finacnial markets. I often see Blended bandwdith combining Global Cross and Level3, not sure why these two are chosen as a pair. Maybe its simply becaue they tend to be colocated at the same carrier hotels? But selecting a transit provider is not as simple as saying one is better. My personaly opinion is, find the two lowest cost providers, and then you can afford to buy more bandwidth, and have two options to route customers. You also need to consider the path to where you take it. For example, Cogent remote tenant buildings likely have routers with less ram that cant handle full BGP tables, so they require creating session to two seperate BGP servers (with the second one having full routes.). But of you connect to them inb a major colo center that doesn;t exist. Similar things exist with other providers depending on where you pick up the circuit. What I like about Abovenet, is they'll map out their network for you, so you know exactly what you are buying, so true redunancy can be built into the network design. Cogent is a bit more secrative about the traffic path. XO has had some really good account reps, and I liked that. But for me, they didn't really give me anything exciting as far as price or performance, more than anyone else. It should also be noted that it could make a big difference which local colo you pick the circuit up in also. So when you are evaluating a provider you are also evaluating the venue where the circuit is in. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Brad Belton b...@belwave.com To: bcl...@spectraaccess.com; 'WISPA General List' wireless@wispa.org Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 3:47 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Cogent can be ok, but they are not equal to AboveNET, XO, ATT, Level3 etc... We have multiple upstream GigE feeds and Cogent is one of them
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Web hosts are usually fairly good sources. They buy large quantities from many carriers and often have a lot of inbound capacity available. Check out BGPlay for the routing and reliability of a certain IP block. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Nick Olsen n...@brevardwireless.com Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 5:24 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams As we can all see, This is very dependent on market. Bret here has had a great time with cogent, where others are quick to say its a lesser provider. Arguing which carrier has better uptime is a waste of time. Long story short, Pick what is the best in that market. You might even get away with looking up some of the big company's in your city, and if they peer with someone you might also want to peer with (like cogent). Give them a call and see if you can get a tech, see what they have to say about $CARRIER in your area. They might tell you to jump in a lake, but you might get someone cool who is willing to talk. Nick Olsen Brevard Wireless (321) 205-1100 x106 From: Bret Clark bcl...@spectraaccess.com Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 6:10 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Brad Belton wrote: While I agree no solution can be considered equal in any given location, there are trends or a general barometer to help place one carrier over another. Such as? This is exactly my point (being made by Tom, a Cogent customer!) why Cogent should not be depended on as a sole or primary Internet feed. If Cogent's all you got then you're SOL! Baloney, we've used them as one of our primary's for well over a year without hiccup. Our so other better providers have given us more frustration. Bottom line is any carrier can break. If you can only have one then find one that breaks the least. If you can have more than one, Cogent is a good low cost second or third to have in a pinch for relatively little cost. Where are you getting your data from? Curious as to why you feel they are a second or third alternative? Bret WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Not to you, but to the thread: Cogent isn't even the low cost leader anymore. PCCW is often cheaper as is HE. HE even has $1250 GEs and $400 FEs. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.net Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 9:17 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Brad, Once again I disagree. Cogent represents themselves as low cost, but they have never represented themselves as low quality. Second, Cogent is most ideal as the FIRST PRIMARY provider, because Cogent is higher performing, and faster speed connections are more affordable. I agree, a backup secondary provider is needed to help when there are short outages. The backup providers dont need to be as high a capacity, or as quality, as they are seldom used exempt in the rare emergencies. Third, What determines how inexpensive a Transit provider is has nothing to do with Quality, it has to do with who has more settlement free peers. Cogent costs less, because Cogent has to pay fewer other ISPs for capacity. This DOES NOT mean they use low quality public peering, it means that they have more quality private peering negotiated at better terms. Bottom line is any carrier can break That, I agree with. Which is why its important to have two upstreams. But, that is not a reason to not buy Cogent first. By buying Cogent first it allows a provider to become more profitable sooner, and therefore able to afford sooner multiple upstreams. Its also depends on what the downstream offers in its value proposition. With Cogent, I offer my custoemrs Gig-E when others can offer 100mb. With Cogent, I can offer my customers half the price, if not 1/3rd the price that my tier2 competitiors can offer. With Cogent, I offer excellent performance, better than most, most of the time, and if they get an outage so what. Is it really better to have less good performance all the time, to gain .009 better uptime? That depends on the target client base of the WISP. You also got another thing right... I am largely dependant on Cogent, and I hate that. But its relevent to ask why I'm dependant? When I first started out, it was because of price, but not anymore. I'm dependant on Cogent because its really hard to find a Tier1 Carrier that can offer anywhere near as equivellent consistent performance and tech support. My customers really noticed, everytime I tried someone else, so someone else never lastest. Note that I did not say uptime, I said performance. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Brad Belton b...@belwave.com To: 'WISPA General List' wireless@wispa.org Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 6:01 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams While I agree no solution can be considered equal in any given location, there are trends or a general barometer to help place one carrier over another. This is the reality that typically puts Cogent towards the back of the bus in most people's minds. The biggest proponents of Cogent are those that are largely dependent on Cogent due to any number of reasons. Budget constraints, lack of alternate higher quality peer availability etc, etc. Cogent makes no excuse promoting themselves as the low end, budget driven bottom dollar provider. They are good for what they offer, but again not what a network administrator looking for high availability is going to pick as a first choice. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. This is exactly my point (being made by Tom, a Cogent customer!) why Cogent should not be depended on as a sole or primary Internet feed. If Cogent's all you got then you're SOL! Bottom line is any carrier can break. If you can only have one then find one that breaks the least. If you can have more than one, Cogent is a good low cost second or third to have in a pinch for relatively little cost. Best, Brad -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Tom DeReggi Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 4:28 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering. In the DC and NY markets, Cogent has excellent performance and peering, and has shown to outperform EVERY provider we have tried, period. (And yes, some of the carriers we tried were Level3, XO, and Abovenet.) I recognize that Cogent's performance may not be as good for ALL markets where they potentially could have a weaker presence. But saying Cogent is only worthy of the 3rd or 4th transit connection
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Many carriers swap routes around. http://www.fixedorbit.com/stats.htm http://www.fixedorbit.com/AS/2/AS2828.htm According to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network XO has paid peering with Sprint and L3, but some information on that page isn't exactly current with things I've heard elsewhere. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Josh Luthman j...@imaginenetworksllc.com Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 4:31 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Isn't XO a Level3 reseller? Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373 When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. --- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.netwrote: It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering. In the DC and NY markets, Cogent has excellent performance and peering, and has shown to outperform EVERY provider we have tried, period. (And yes, some of the carriers we tried were Level3, XO, and Abovenet.) I recognize that Cogent's performance may not be as good for ALL markets where they potentially could have a weaker presence. But saying Cogent is only worthy of the 3rd or 4th transit connection is simply untrue. Cogent's weak point now is internal processes and communication. They've lost touch with the value of having personal Account Reps, and render the reps powerless to manage the accounts, in favor of the customer relationship managed by the clueless billing/collections department. Its a shame. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. But their tech support has been the best by far in the industry, and oversubscription has never been a problem from what I see. In picking a Transit provider its really a decision about where your traffic typically flows, and where you need good performance to. NOT anyone has best performance everywhere. For example, Hurricane has excellent performance AND they are inexpensive. They have a really good peering presensence in CA. I'm not confident that they have nearly as good a presence on the East coast though, but those that have used them on teh east coast that I know have been happy. We were considering using them. Abovenet has great Gig-E Transport. But their transit is expensive, and its because its more expensive for them to provide it, because they are not as well positioned to do it cost effectively, not because its necessarilly better. Level3 as well, has many strength. They have a lot of web host clients. It can really help performance to reach certain sites. Level3 also tends to blocks smaller BGP block announcements, more so than someone like Cogent. Level3 is good for a secondaryu because they usually have diverse routes. Some providers have good performance to France, Amsterdam, India, others dont. Savvis tends to have real peering to NY finacnial markets. I often see Blended bandwdith combining Global Cross and Level3, not sure why these two are chosen as a pair. Maybe its simply becaue they tend to be colocated at the same carrier hotels? But selecting a transit provider is not as simple as saying one is better. My personaly opinion is, find the two lowest cost providers, and then you can afford to buy more bandwidth, and have two options to route customers. You also need to consider the path to where you take it. For example, Cogent remote tenant buildings likely have routers with less ram that cant handle full BGP tables, so they require creating session to two seperate BGP servers (with the second one having full routes.). But of you connect to them inb a major colo center that doesn;t exist. Similar things exist with other providers depending on where you pick up the circuit. What I like about Abovenet, is they'll map out their network for you, so WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
HE even has $1250 GEs Wow, is that transport or transit? Yeah, 2 months ago, we were going to get an Abovenet transport to Hurricain transit because Hurricane's market low pricing, but then Equinix started giving us a hard time on colo, trying to charge us more for the colo than both the transport and transit links combined, so we pulled the plug on the order. Hurricaine had the $2 /mb on GIg-E as long as also do IPv6 w/ IPv4. But where HE did better is they also gave good pricing on the low capacity commits. That makes it cost effective to give HE a try, before going all out, provided you're in a colo they are at. We also found a couple providers that had some really cool programs like you commit to a monthly dollar figure, but could accept the bandwdith from any Equinix facility or distributed between several of them, and move the capacity on the fly to either location. It was great option for someone wanting to expand nationwide, but not knowing where sales will develop first more. But it also allowed Gig-E pricing without having to pay for GIg-E in multiple locations. Its to bad its at Equinix though, cause a lot of teh value proposition got killed once transport added to it to get out to remote cell site, or Equinix's clueless overcharging of antenna roof space. Again its really sad when someone tried to charge more for an antenna position than a GIg-E fiber link. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Mike Hammett wispawirel...@ics-il.net To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:24 AM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Not to you, but to the thread: Cogent isn't even the low cost leader anymore. PCCW is often cheaper as is HE. HE even has $1250 GEs and $400 FEs. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.net Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 9:17 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Brad, Once again I disagree. Cogent represents themselves as low cost, but they have never represented themselves as low quality. Second, Cogent is most ideal as the FIRST PRIMARY provider, because Cogent is higher performing, and faster speed connections are more affordable. I agree, a backup secondary provider is needed to help when there are short outages. The backup providers dont need to be as high a capacity, or as quality, as they are seldom used exempt in the rare emergencies. Third, What determines how inexpensive a Transit provider is has nothing to do with Quality, it has to do with who has more settlement free peers. Cogent costs less, because Cogent has to pay fewer other ISPs for capacity. This DOES NOT mean they use low quality public peering, it means that they have more quality private peering negotiated at better terms. Bottom line is any carrier can break That, I agree with. Which is why its important to have two upstreams. But, that is not a reason to not buy Cogent first. By buying Cogent first it allows a provider to become more profitable sooner, and therefore able to afford sooner multiple upstreams. Its also depends on what the downstream offers in its value proposition. With Cogent, I offer my custoemrs Gig-E when others can offer 100mb. With Cogent, I can offer my customers half the price, if not 1/3rd the price that my tier2 competitiors can offer. With Cogent, I offer excellent performance, better than most, most of the time, and if they get an outage so what. Is it really better to have less good performance all the time, to gain .009 better uptime? That depends on the target client base of the WISP. You also got another thing right... I am largely dependant on Cogent, and I hate that. But its relevent to ask why I'm dependant? When I first started out, it was because of price, but not anymore. I'm dependant on Cogent because its really hard to find a Tier1 Carrier that can offer anywhere near as equivellent consistent performance and tech support. My customers really noticed, everytime I tried someone else, so someone else never lastest. Note that I did not say uptime, I said performance. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Brad Belton b...@belwave.com To: 'WISPA General List' wireless@wispa.org Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 6:01 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams While I agree no solution can be considered equal in any given location, there are trends or a general barometer to help place one carrier over another. This is the reality that typically puts Cogent towards the back of the bus in most people's minds. The biggest proponents of Cogent are those that are largely dependent on Cogent due
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Useful site. I found it particular intersting that Level3 was high up on all teh stats. These are all good metric for evaluating provider's peering relevence and size. What these sites dont help with is tell you the capacity or throughput accross the routes. A company could have 1000 more peers than someone else, but if they were all 100 mbps peers, it might not deliver near as much performance if all the peers were 10GB. What would be interesting would be to have stats on average capacity per peer connection. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Mike Hammett wispawirel...@ics-il.net To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:25 AM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Many carriers swap routes around. http://www.fixedorbit.com/stats.htm http://www.fixedorbit.com/AS/2/AS2828.htm According to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network XO has paid peering with Sprint and L3, but some information on that page isn't exactly current with things I've heard elsewhere. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Josh Luthman j...@imaginenetworksllc.com Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 4:31 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Isn't XO a Level3 reseller? Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373 When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. --- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.netwrote: It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering. In the DC and NY markets, Cogent has excellent performance and peering, and has shown to outperform EVERY provider we have tried, period. (And yes, some of the carriers we tried were Level3, XO, and Abovenet.) I recognize that Cogent's performance may not be as good for ALL markets where they potentially could have a weaker presence. But saying Cogent is only worthy of the 3rd or 4th transit connection is simply untrue. Cogent's weak point now is internal processes and communication. They've lost touch with the value of having personal Account Reps, and render the reps powerless to manage the accounts, in favor of the customer relationship managed by the clueless billing/collections department. Its a shame. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. But their tech support has been the best by far in the industry, and oversubscription has never been a problem from what I see. In picking a Transit provider its really a decision about where your traffic typically flows, and where you need good performance to. NOT anyone has best performance everywhere. For example, Hurricane has excellent performance AND they are inexpensive. They have a really good peering presensence in CA. I'm not confident that they have nearly as good a presence on the East coast though, but those that have used them on teh east coast that I know have been happy. We were considering using them. Abovenet has great Gig-E Transport. But their transit is expensive, and its because its more expensive for them to provide it, because they are not as well positioned to do it cost effectively, not because its necessarilly better. Level3 as well, has many strength. They have a lot of web host clients. It can really help performance to reach certain sites. Level3 also tends to blocks smaller BGP block announcements, more so than someone like Cogent. Level3 is good for a secondaryu because they usually have diverse routes. Some providers have good performance to France, Amsterdam, India, others dont. Savvis tends to have real peering to NY finacnial markets. I often see Blended bandwdith combining Global Cross and Level3, not sure why these two are chosen as a pair. Maybe its simply becaue they tend to be colocated at the same carrier hotels? But selecting a transit provider is not as simple as saying one is better. My personaly opinion is, find the two lowest cost providers, and then you can afford to buy more bandwidth, and have two options to route customers. You also need to consider the path to where you take it. For example, Cogent remote tenant buildings likely have routers with less ram that cant handle full BGP tables, so they require creating session to two seperate BGP servers (with the second one having full routes.). But of you connect to them inb a major colo center that doesn;t exist. Similar things exist with other providers depending on where you pick up the circuit. What I like about Abovenet, is they'll
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Our situation is thus: We are leasing a 45 Mile1 Gig fiber link from Greenville TX to 2323 Bryan ST. in Dallas (carrier hotel). My primary need is quality bandwidth. This will become my preferred route to the world. Secondary requirement is a company I won't have to spend 1 year working to get the billing correct. I am installing a 1 Gig (800M/800M) licensed PTP link from my NOC to another lit building in Richardson TX for path diversity. The choice of carriers here will be more limited. With Abovenet being one of the primary choices. I do not want this connection to go to the same carrier as the other connection. It's really kind of funny I was just a few years ago (12) when bonded 6 T's together and thought I had all the bandwidth in the world! Now I'll have and additional 2G at my NOC for less than I was paying for the 6 Ts. Marco WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
AboveNET will layout the exact path your fiber feed will be for you. Just make sure you're secondary path is completely diverse from whatever you choose as your primary. My suggestion would be to go with AboveNET or Level3 as your primary and use Cogent as your secondary. We haven't had any billing issues with any of our upstream providers that wasn't easily straightened out. Maybe we've just been lucky or maybe we just review our agreements more closely and haven't allowed for any chance of discrepancies. As they say...YMMV! Best, Brad -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Marco Coelho Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 10:01 AM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Our situation is thus: We are leasing a 45 Mile1 Gig fiber link from Greenville TX to 2323 Bryan ST. in Dallas (carrier hotel). My primary need is quality bandwidth. This will become my preferred route to the world. Secondary requirement is a company I won't have to spend 1 year working to get the billing correct. I am installing a 1 Gig (800M/800M) licensed PTP link from my NOC to another lit building in Richardson TX for path diversity. The choice of carriers here will be more limited. With Abovenet being one of the primary choices. I do not want this connection to go to the same carrier as the other connection. It's really kind of funny I was just a few years ago (12) when bonded 6 T's together and thought I had all the bandwidth in the world! Now I'll have and additional 2G at my NOC for less than I was paying for the 6 Ts. Marco WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Worldcom was the worst for billing issues. MCI was the bomb before they were assimilated. On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:10 AM, Brad Belton b...@belwave.com wrote: AboveNET will layout the exact path your fiber feed will be for you. Just make sure you're secondary path is completely diverse from whatever you choose as your primary. My suggestion would be to go with AboveNET or Level3 as your primary and use Cogent as your secondary. We haven't had any billing issues with any of our upstream providers that wasn't easily straightened out. Maybe we've just been lucky or maybe we just review our agreements more closely and haven't allowed for any chance of discrepancies. As they say...YMMV! Best, Brad -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Marco Coelho Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 10:01 AM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Our situation is thus: We are leasing a 45 Mile1 Gig fiber link from Greenville TX to 2323 Bryan ST. in Dallas (carrier hotel). My primary need is quality bandwidth. This will become my preferred route to the world. Secondary requirement is a company I won't have to spend 1 year working to get the billing correct. I am installing a 1 Gig (800M/800M) licensed PTP link from my NOC to another lit building in Richardson TX for path diversity. The choice of carriers here will be more limited. With Abovenet being one of the primary choices. I do not want this connection to go to the same carrier as the other connection. It's really kind of funny I was just a few years ago (12) when bonded 6 T's together and thought I had all the bandwidth in the world! Now I'll have and additional 2G at my NOC for less than I was paying for the 6 Ts. Marco WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
I'm not sure how Equinix is in other cities, but in Chicago, they are just one tenant among many in the building. Equinix charges a lot for everything. If you can find another tenant such as TelX or a web host, I'd go there (depending on cross connect charges). It's transit. Usually in the metro areas, transit is cheaper than transport because with transport they have to be able to carry 100% of the traffic to wherever it's going. With transit, they can offload (maybe significant) portions of the traffic to other carriers within the building instead of on their 10GigEs going elsewhere. I'd recommend that anyone in a metro area *investigate* dark fiber thoroughly. I'm too small to buy it on my own, but depending on the market, dark fiber can be cheap and get you to where you need to be. It's not always in the right spots outside of the carrier hotels, but usually that can be solved by short builds or wireless. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.net Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:39 AM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams HE even has $1250 GEs Wow, is that transport or transit? Yeah, 2 months ago, we were going to get an Abovenet transport to Hurricain transit because Hurricane's market low pricing, but then Equinix started giving us a hard time on colo, trying to charge us more for the colo than both the transport and transit links combined, so we pulled the plug on the order. Hurricaine had the $2 /mb on GIg-E as long as also do IPv6 w/ IPv4. But where HE did better is they also gave good pricing on the low capacity commits. That makes it cost effective to give HE a try, before going all out, provided you're in a colo they are at. We also found a couple providers that had some really cool programs like you commit to a monthly dollar figure, but could accept the bandwdith from any Equinix facility or distributed between several of them, and move the capacity on the fly to either location. It was great option for someone wanting to expand nationwide, but not knowing where sales will develop first more. But it also allowed Gig-E pricing without having to pay for GIg-E in multiple locations. Its to bad its at Equinix though, cause a lot of teh value proposition got killed once transport added to it to get out to remote cell site, or Equinix's clueless overcharging of antenna roof space. Again its really sad when someone tried to charge more for an antenna position than a GIg-E fiber link. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Mike Hammett wispawirel...@ics-il.net To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:24 AM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Not to you, but to the thread: Cogent isn't even the low cost leader anymore. PCCW is often cheaper as is HE. HE even has $1250 GEs and $400 FEs. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.net Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 9:17 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Brad, Once again I disagree. Cogent represents themselves as low cost, but they have never represented themselves as low quality. Second, Cogent is most ideal as the FIRST PRIMARY provider, because Cogent is higher performing, and faster speed connections are more affordable. I agree, a backup secondary provider is needed to help when there are short outages. The backup providers dont need to be as high a capacity, or as quality, as they are seldom used exempt in the rare emergencies. Third, What determines how inexpensive a Transit provider is has nothing to do with Quality, it has to do with who has more settlement free peers. Cogent costs less, because Cogent has to pay fewer other ISPs for capacity. This DOES NOT mean they use low quality public peering, it means that they have more quality private peering negotiated at better terms. Bottom line is any carrier can break That, I agree with. Which is why its important to have two upstreams. But, that is not a reason to not buy Cogent first. By buying Cogent first it allows a provider to become more profitable sooner, and therefore able to afford sooner multiple upstreams. Its also depends on what the downstream offers in its value proposition. With Cogent, I offer my custoemrs Gig-E when others can offer 100mb. With Cogent, I can offer my customers half the price, if not 1/3rd the price that my tier2 competitiors can offer. With Cogent, I offer excellent performance, better than most, most of the time, and if they get an outage so what. Is it really better
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
That sort of information would be impossible to have without the carrier providing it. The more peers a carrier has, the less finger pointing can go on. If L(3) or Cogent are your carriers and you're having connectivity issues to someone else that also uses them, they can't blame anyone because they're the only ones. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.net Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:59 AM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Useful site. I found it particular intersting that Level3 was high up on all teh stats. These are all good metric for evaluating provider's peering relevence and size. What these sites dont help with is tell you the capacity or throughput accross the routes. A company could have 1000 more peers than someone else, but if they were all 100 mbps peers, it might not deliver near as much performance if all the peers were 10GB. What would be interesting would be to have stats on average capacity per peer connection. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Mike Hammett wispawirel...@ics-il.net To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:25 AM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Many carriers swap routes around. http://www.fixedorbit.com/stats.htm http://www.fixedorbit.com/AS/2/AS2828.htm According to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network XO has paid peering with Sprint and L3, but some information on that page isn't exactly current with things I've heard elsewhere. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Josh Luthman j...@imaginenetworksllc.com Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 4:31 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Isn't XO a Level3 reseller? Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373 When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. --- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.netwrote: It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering. In the DC and NY markets, Cogent has excellent performance and peering, and has shown to outperform EVERY provider we have tried, period. (And yes, some of the carriers we tried were Level3, XO, and Abovenet.) I recognize that Cogent's performance may not be as good for ALL markets where they potentially could have a weaker presence. But saying Cogent is only worthy of the 3rd or 4th transit connection is simply untrue. Cogent's weak point now is internal processes and communication. They've lost touch with the value of having personal Account Reps, and render the reps powerless to manage the accounts, in favor of the customer relationship managed by the clueless billing/collections department. Its a shame. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. But their tech support has been the best by far in the industry, and oversubscription has never been a problem from what I see. In picking a Transit provider its really a decision about where your traffic typically flows, and where you need good performance to. NOT anyone has best performance everywhere. For example, Hurricane has excellent performance AND they are inexpensive. They have a really good peering presensence in CA. I'm not confident that they have nearly as good a presence on the East coast though, but those that have used them on teh east coast that I know have been happy. We were considering using them. Abovenet has great Gig-E Transport. But their transit is expensive, and its because its more expensive for them to provide it, because they are not as well positioned to do it cost effectively, not because its necessarilly better. Level3 as well, has many strength. They have a lot of web host clients. It can really help performance to reach certain sites. Level3 also tends to blocks smaller BGP block announcements, more so than someone like Cogent. Level3 is good for a secondaryu because they usually have diverse routes. Some providers have good performance to France, Amsterdam, India, others dont. Savvis tends to have real peering to NY finacnial markets. I often see Blended bandwdith combining Global Cross and Level3, not sure why these two are chosen as a pair. Maybe its simply becaue they tend to be colocated at the same carrier hotels? But selecting a transit provider is not as simple as saying one
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
We got severely screwed during the MCI-Verizon transition. They stopped billing us our overage on our DS-3 for about 6-8 months. We just assumed we hadn't gone over our base rate. All of a sudden, we get an invoice in the mail for something like $20k+. The very next day we get a call from collections asking why we haven't paid our bill and that it's past due. We explain that we just received it and explained how they put all the charges in for their original dates instead of for the invoice date. Next day, our service goes down. We are on the phone calling everyone. Support says our circuit is up and everything is fine. Get a hold of billing and they say we were shut off for non-payment. We pay the bill over the phone and the circuit is still down for several hours. We call for days asking for answers and no one knows what happened or why we were down. Support says it was a problem with our equipment and that the circuit wasn't turned off due to non-payment. We had already setup another connection but didn't have a backhaul big enough to handle our traffic yet. Needless to say, we moved all traffic off that circuit the next day and called and cancelled the Verizon DS-3. Now, for the funny part. We cancelled the service as fast as we could per our contract. Something like 30 days notice or something. But even after that, they left the circuit up and running. We disconnected it from our router it was still connected to the CSU. About three months later, they actually pull the circuit. We get a call from support telling us that it appears our connection is down and to check our equipment! I explained that the reason it was down was due to the cancellation. They still tried to bill us for the time of cancellation until they removed the circuit. Lots of fighting later, even after showing them their letter confirming our cancellation after received our certified letter, I don't think it was ever resolved. The circuit was originally purchased from UUNET and there were great. MCI acquired them and support went downhill fast. Like Cogent, you could have someone at UUNET look at BGP problems 24/7. Once MCI took over, they only had an engineer available M-F,8-5. Once Verizon took over, it was absolutely terrible. On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Marco Coelho coelh...@gmail.com wrote: Worldcom was the worst for billing issues. MCI was the bomb before they were assimilated. On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:10 AM, Brad Belton b...@belwave.com wrote: AboveNET will layout the exact path your fiber feed will be for you. Just make sure you're secondary path is completely diverse from whatever you choose as your primary. My suggestion would be to go with AboveNET or Level3 as your primary and use Cogent as your secondary. We haven't had any billing issues with any of our upstream providers that wasn't easily straightened out. Maybe we've just been lucky or maybe we just review our agreements more closely and haven't allowed for any chance of discrepancies. As they say...YMMV! Best, Brad -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Marco Coelho Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 10:01 AM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Our situation is thus: We are leasing a 45 Mile1 Gig fiber link from Greenville TX to 2323 Bryan ST. in Dallas (carrier hotel). My primary need is quality bandwidth. This will become my preferred route to the world. Secondary requirement is a company I won't have to spend 1 year working to get the billing correct. I am installing a 1 Gig (800M/800M) licensed PTP link from my NOC to another lit building in Richardson TX for path diversity. The choice of carriers here will be more limited. With Abovenet being one of the primary choices. I do not want this connection to go to the same carrier as the other connection. It's really kind of funny I was just a few years ago (12) when bonded 6 T's together and thought I had all the bandwidth in the world! Now I'll have and additional 2G at my NOC for less than I was paying for the 6 Ts. Marco WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -- Marco C
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Hold that... UUNET, not MCI On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:27 AM, Marco Coelho coelh...@gmail.com wrote: Worldcom was the worst for billing issues. MCI was the bomb before they were assimilated. On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:10 AM, Brad Belton b...@belwave.com wrote: AboveNET will layout the exact path your fiber feed will be for you. Just make sure you're secondary path is completely diverse from whatever you choose as your primary. My suggestion would be to go with AboveNET or Level3 as your primary and use Cogent as your secondary. We haven't had any billing issues with any of our upstream providers that wasn't easily straightened out. Maybe we've just been lucky or maybe we just review our agreements more closely and haven't allowed for any chance of discrepancies. As they say...YMMV! Best, Brad -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Marco Coelho Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 10:01 AM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Our situation is thus: We are leasing a 45 Mile1 Gig fiber link from Greenville TX to 2323 Bryan ST. in Dallas (carrier hotel). My primary need is quality bandwidth. This will become my preferred route to the world. Secondary requirement is a company I won't have to spend 1 year working to get the billing correct. I am installing a 1 Gig (800M/800M) licensed PTP link from my NOC to another lit building in Richardson TX for path diversity. The choice of carriers here will be more limited. With Abovenet being one of the primary choices. I do not want this connection to go to the same carrier as the other connection. It's really kind of funny I was just a few years ago (12) when bonded 6 T's together and thought I had all the bandwidth in the world! Now I'll have and additional 2G at my NOC for less than I was paying for the 6 Ts. Marco WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
On Thu, 2009-10-22 at 12:14 -0400, can...@believewireless.net wrote: The circuit was originally purchased from UUNET and there were great. MCI acquired them and support went downhill fast. Like Cogent, you could have someone at UUNET look at BGP problems 24/7. Once MCI took over, they only had an engineer available M-F,8-5. Once Verizon took over, it was absolutely terrible. That's because all their engineers are following cell phone users around :). Yeah we had a similar problem with Verizon many years ago and won't even talk to their sales person when he tries to sell us service today...like I want to buy from Verizon who has to back-haul the circuit via FairPoint...Yikes!!! We are lucky that there are a couple of mini-clec hotels in our area and we run wireless 1Gbps links for our peering...saves us a fortune in last mile cost! Proud to say our entire network from last mile to back haul links are all wireless except for the copper that ties into the antenna's. WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Marco, If you are considering Level3, you may also want to get a price quote from WBSConnect, who is a Level3 reseller. They can sometimes be very competitive, and give you an idea if you are paying what you should. I'd be interested in learning what Abovenet quotes you for Gig-E Transit. Also, To share what we did last, we didn't pick a pri and sec, we picked two primary's, and the other PRimary acted as a backup to the other PRimary. Thdn we routed shortest path to each NOC. That however did take some IP space coordination and planning. But the benefit of that was it allowed us to purchase half the amount of bandwdith and gain the same performance. Once each connection is on a Gig-E port, its easy to upgrade either side as demand needed. Then the rare times there are outages, it was OK, if the capacity was a bit over subscribed. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Brad Belton b...@belwave.com To: 'WISPA General List' wireless@wispa.org Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 11:10 AM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams AboveNET will layout the exact path your fiber feed will be for you. Just make sure you're secondary path is completely diverse from whatever you choose as your primary. My suggestion would be to go with AboveNET or Level3 as your primary and use Cogent as your secondary. We haven't had any billing issues with any of our upstream providers that wasn't easily straightened out. Maybe we've just been lucky or maybe we just review our agreements more closely and haven't allowed for any chance of discrepancies. As they say...YMMV! Best, Brad -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Marco Coelho Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 10:01 AM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Our situation is thus: We are leasing a 45 Mile1 Gig fiber link from Greenville TX to 2323 Bryan ST. in Dallas (carrier hotel). My primary need is quality bandwidth. This will become my preferred route to the world. Secondary requirement is a company I won't have to spend 1 year working to get the billing correct. I am installing a 1 Gig (800M/800M) licensed PTP link from my NOC to another lit building in Richardson TX for path diversity. The choice of carriers here will be more limited. With Abovenet being one of the primary choices. I do not want this connection to go to the same carrier as the other connection. It's really kind of funny I was just a few years ago (12) when bonded 6 T's together and thought I had all the bandwidth in the world! Now I'll have and additional 2G at my NOC for less than I was paying for the 6 Ts. Marco WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Right. MCI billing was a nightmare. -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Marco Coelho Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 12:23 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Hold that... UUNET, not MCI On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:27 AM, Marco Coelho coelh...@gmail.com wrote: Worldcom was the worst for billing issues. MCI was the bomb before they were assimilated. On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:10 AM, Brad Belton b...@belwave.com wrote: AboveNET will layout the exact path your fiber feed will be for you. Just make sure you're secondary path is completely diverse from whatever you choose as your primary. My suggestion would be to go with AboveNET or Level3 as your primary and use Cogent as your secondary. We haven't had any billing issues with any of our upstream providers that wasn't easily straightened out. Maybe we've just been lucky or maybe we just review our agreements more closely and haven't allowed for any chance of discrepancies. As they say...YMMV! Best, Brad -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Marco Coelho Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 10:01 AM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Our situation is thus: We are leasing a 45 Mile1 Gig fiber link from Greenville TX to 2323 Bryan ST. in Dallas (carrier hotel). My primary need is quality bandwidth. This will become my preferred route to the world. Secondary requirement is a company I won't have to spend 1 year working to get the billing correct. I am installing a 1 Gig (800M/800M) licensed PTP link from my NOC to another lit building in Richardson TX for path diversity. The choice of carriers here will be more limited. With Abovenet being one of the primary choices. I do not want this connection to go to the same carrier as the other connection. It's really kind of funny I was just a few years ago (12) when bonded 6 T's together and thought I had all the bandwidth in the world! Now I'll have and additional 2G at my NOC for less than I was paying for the 6 Ts. Marco WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
I'm not sure how Equinix is in other cities, but in Chicago, they are just one tenant among many in the building. Equinix charges a lot for everything. Thats good to know. Here in Ashburn, its not the case, they own all the buildings, and there are several. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Mike Hammett wispawirel...@ics-il.net To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 12:08 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams I'm not sure how Equinix is in other cities, but in Chicago, they are just one tenant among many in the building. Equinix charges a lot for everything. If you can find another tenant such as TelX or a web host, I'd go there (depending on cross connect charges). It's transit. Usually in the metro areas, transit is cheaper than transport because with transport they have to be able to carry 100% of the traffic to wherever it's going. With transit, they can offload (maybe significant) portions of the traffic to other carriers within the building instead of on their 10GigEs going elsewhere. I'd recommend that anyone in a metro area *investigate* dark fiber thoroughly. I'm too small to buy it on my own, but depending on the market, dark fiber can be cheap and get you to where you need to be. It's not always in the right spots outside of the carrier hotels, but usually that can be solved by short builds or wireless. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.net Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:39 AM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams HE even has $1250 GEs Wow, is that transport or transit? Yeah, 2 months ago, we were going to get an Abovenet transport to Hurricain transit because Hurricane's market low pricing, but then Equinix started giving us a hard time on colo, trying to charge us more for the colo than both the transport and transit links combined, so we pulled the plug on the order. Hurricaine had the $2 /mb on GIg-E as long as also do IPv6 w/ IPv4. But where HE did better is they also gave good pricing on the low capacity commits. That makes it cost effective to give HE a try, before going all out, provided you're in a colo they are at. We also found a couple providers that had some really cool programs like you commit to a monthly dollar figure, but could accept the bandwdith from any Equinix facility or distributed between several of them, and move the capacity on the fly to either location. It was great option for someone wanting to expand nationwide, but not knowing where sales will develop first more. But it also allowed Gig-E pricing without having to pay for GIg-E in multiple locations. Its to bad its at Equinix though, cause a lot of teh value proposition got killed once transport added to it to get out to remote cell site, or Equinix's clueless overcharging of antenna roof space. Again its really sad when someone tried to charge more for an antenna position than a GIg-E fiber link. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Mike Hammett wispawirel...@ics-il.net To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:24 AM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Not to you, but to the thread: Cogent isn't even the low cost leader anymore. PCCW is often cheaper as is HE. HE even has $1250 GEs and $400 FEs. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.net Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 9:17 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Brad, Once again I disagree. Cogent represents themselves as low cost, but they have never represented themselves as low quality. Second, Cogent is most ideal as the FIRST PRIMARY provider, because Cogent is higher performing, and faster speed connections are more affordable. I agree, a backup secondary provider is needed to help when there are short outages. The backup providers dont need to be as high a capacity, or as quality, as they are seldom used exempt in the rare emergencies. Third, What determines how inexpensive a Transit provider is has nothing to do with Quality, it has to do with who has more settlement free peers. Cogent costs less, because Cogent has to pay fewer other ISPs for capacity. This DOES NOT mean they use low quality public peering, it means that they have more quality private peering negotiated at better terms. Bottom line is any carrier can break That, I agree with. Which is why its important to have two upstreams. But, that is not a reason
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
I just got a quote today from a HE reseller for the HE facility in Fremont CA $599 cabinet with 15 amps $699 cabinet with 15 amps and 20 Megabits/sec $899 cabinet with 15 amps and 100 megabits/sec John Tom DeReggi wrote: HE even has $1250 GEs Wow, is that transport or transit? Yeah, 2 months ago, we were going to get an Abovenet transport to Hurricain transit because Hurricane's market low pricing, but then Equinix started giving us a hard time on colo, trying to charge us more for the colo than both the transport and transit links combined, so we pulled the plug on the order. Hurricaine had the $2 /mb on GIg-E as long as also do IPv6 w/ IPv4. But where HE did better is they also gave good pricing on the low capacity commits. That makes it cost effective to give HE a try, before going all out, provided you're in a colo they are at. We also found a couple providers that had some really cool programs like you commit to a monthly dollar figure, but could accept the bandwdith from any Equinix facility or distributed between several of them, and move the capacity on the fly to either location. It was great option for someone wanting to expand nationwide, but not knowing where sales will develop first more. But it also allowed Gig-E pricing without having to pay for GIg-E in multiple locations. Its to bad its at Equinix though, cause a lot of teh value proposition got killed once transport added to it to get out to remote cell site, or Equinix's clueless overcharging of antenna roof space. Again its really sad when someone tried to charge more for an antenna position than a GIg-E fiber link. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Mike Hammett wispawirel...@ics-il.net To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:24 AM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Not to you, but to the thread: Cogent isn't even the low cost leader anymore. PCCW is often cheaper as is HE. HE even has $1250 GEs and $400 FEs. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.net Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 9:17 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Brad, Once again I disagree. Cogent represents themselves as low cost, but they have never represented themselves as low quality. Second, Cogent is most ideal as the FIRST PRIMARY provider, because Cogent is higher performing, and faster speed connections are more affordable. I agree, a backup secondary provider is needed to help when there are short outages. The backup providers dont need to be as high a capacity, or as quality, as they are seldom used exempt in the rare emergencies. Third, What determines how inexpensive a Transit provider is has nothing to do with Quality, it has to do with who has more settlement free peers. Cogent costs less, because Cogent has to pay fewer other ISPs for capacity. This DOES NOT mean they use low quality public peering, it means that they have more quality private peering negotiated at better terms. Bottom line is any carrier can break That, I agree with. Which is why its important to have two upstreams. But, that is not a reason to not buy Cogent first. By buying Cogent first it allows a provider to become more profitable sooner, and therefore able to afford sooner multiple upstreams. Its also depends on what the downstream offers in its value proposition. With Cogent, I offer my custoemrs Gig-E when others can offer 100mb. With Cogent, I can offer my customers half the price, if not 1/3rd the price that my tier2 competitiors can offer. With Cogent, I offer excellent performance, better than most, most of the time, and if they get an outage so what. Is it really better to have less good performance all the time, to gain .009 better uptime? That depends on the target client base of the WISP. You also got another thing right... I am largely dependant on Cogent, and I hate that. But its relevent to ask why I'm dependant? When I first started out, it was because of price, but not anymore. I'm dependant on Cogent because its really hard to find a Tier1 Carrier that can offer anywhere near as equivellent consistent performance and tech support. My customers really noticed, everytime I tried someone else, so someone else never lastest. Note that I did not say uptime, I said performance. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Brad Belton b...@belwave.com To: 'WISPA General List' wireless@wispa.org Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 6:01 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams While I agree no solution can be considered equal
[WISPA] choice of upstreams
I'm a GigE circuit to the mix, and I've got a choice of: Abovenet Cogent Global Crossing Level3 Savvis I'm looking for recommendations of who the better upstream is. Marco -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Level 3 has been solid for us. On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 12:07 PM, Marco Coelho coelh...@gmail.com wrote: I'm a GigE circuit to the mix, and I've got a choice of: Abovenet Cogent Global Crossing Level3 Savvis I'm looking for recommendations of who the better upstream is. Marco -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
I've been a big fan of Level3 but yesterday they had the same issue twice in Atlanta. Massive outage. Can't really say much more then I am disappointed to hear why it happened. Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373 When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. --- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 12:32 PM, can...@believewireless.net p...@believewireless.net wrote: Level 3 has been solid for us. On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 12:07 PM, Marco Coelho coelh...@gmail.com wrote: I'm a GigE circuit to the mix, and I've got a choice of: Abovenet Cogent Global Crossing Level3 Savvis I'm looking for recommendations of who the better upstream is. Marco -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Stay far far away from Savvis. They did me VERY dirty on a circuit I needed to move. -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Marco Coelho Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 11:07 AM To: WISPA General List Subject: [WISPA] choice of upstreams I'm a GigE circuit to the mix, and I've got a choice of: Abovenet Cogent Global Crossing Level3 Savvis I'm looking for recommendations of who the better upstream is. Marco -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Cogent has a bad rap but they have been solid for us for the past year. Prior to that they had a few hickups. Their peering is pretty good. Low latency to all major content sites. Level3 seems to have more outages than a provider of their reputation should. Savvis is has poor peering from what I hear. I'd like to add Abovenet or Global crossing to my mix. On 10/21/09, Marco Coelho coelh...@gmail.com wrote: I'm a GigE circuit to the mix, and I've got a choice of: Abovenet Cogent Global Crossing Level3 Savvis I'm looking for recommendations of who the better upstream is. Marco -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -- Sent from my mobile device WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Cogent has cheap bandwidth, and its decently peered. Only other one I can comment on is Level3. Here in orlando they have there share of outages/problems, but have good peering. Really, if your looking for a good mix of routes, with cheap bandwidth cogent is the way to go. They do a lot of peering. Nick Olsen Brevard Wireless (321) 205-1100 x106 From: Jon Auer j...@tapodi.net Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 12:58 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Cogent has a bad rap but they have been solid for us for the past year. Prior to that they had a few hickups. Their peering is pretty good. Low latency to all major content sites. Level3 seems to have more outages than a provider of their reputation should. Savvis is has poor peering from what I hear. I'd like to add Abovenet or Global crossing to my mix. On 10/21/09, Marco Coelho wrote: I'm a GigE circuit to the mix, and I've got a choice of: Abovenet Cogent Global Crossing Level3 Savvis I'm looking for recommendations of who the better upstream is. Marco -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -- Sent from my mobile device WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Choices choices choices.Qwest out here, everything else, you pay Qwest 2x to get to them. 360 Networks is breaking out some fiber here soon though. -Kevin On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Marco Coelho coelh...@gmail.com wrote: I'm a GigE circuit to the mix, and I've got a choice of: Abovenet Cogent Global Crossing Level3 Savvis I'm looking for recommendations of who the better upstream is. Marco -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
If you need a good deal on Cogent, shoot me off-list.. --- Dennis Burgess, CCNA, A+, Mikrotik Certified Trainer WISPA Board Member - wispa.org Link Technologies, Inc -- Mikrotik WISP Support Services WISPA Vendor Member Office: 314-735-0270 Website: http://www.linktechs.net LIVE On-Line Mikrotik Training Author of Learn RouterOS -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Kevin Neal Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 12:28 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Choices choices choices.Qwest out here, everything else, you pay Qwest 2x to get to them. 360 Networks is breaking out some fiber here soon though. -Kevin On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Marco Coelho coelh...@gmail.com wrote: I'm a GigE circuit to the mix, and I've got a choice of: Abovenet Cogent Global Crossing Level3 Savvis I'm looking for recommendations of who the better upstream is. Marco -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
I always hear about Cogent having a bad rap, but where does that come from? I can't say that one bit! They've worked great for us and during the initial install clearly went above and beyond the call of duty when we encountered a problem even waking a VP up at 1AM on a Sunday morning because we need to have the circuit up and running by first thing Monday! When I have add to call their tech support up about questions that actually understand what BGP is and how it works! Bret On Wed, 2009-10-21 at 11:58 -0500, Jon Auer wrote: Cogent has a bad rap but they have been solid for us for the past year. Prior to that they had a few hickups. Their peering is pretty good. Low latency to all major content sites. Level3 seems to have more outages than a provider of their reputation should. Savvis is has poor peering from what I hear. I'd like to add Abovenet or Global crossing to my mix. On 10/21/09, Marco Coelho coelh...@gmail.com wrote: I'm a GigE circuit to the mix, and I've got a choice of: Abovenet Cogent Global Crossing Level3 Savvis I'm looking for recommendations of who the better upstream is. Marco -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
They had congestion problems back prior to 2005 from what I hear due to crazy overselling. Three years ago we had a horrid time with their local POP dropping off the net every other week. I would have to call them and tell them their POP was paritioned because I only saw routes from their other local customers. About two years ago they upgraded the pop from a cisco GSR with some gig fiber leased from a local isp to a 7609/RSP720 running 10gigE on dark fiber from mccleod. Since then they have been amazing. Now they call us if there is a outage or our BGP drops. On 10/21/09, Bret Clark bcl...@spectraaccess.com wrote: I always hear about Cogent having a bad rap, but where does that come from? I can't say that one bit! They've worked great for us and during the initial install clearly went above and beyond the call of duty when we encountered a problem even waking a VP up at 1AM on a Sunday morning because we need to have the circuit up and running by first thing Monday! When I have add to call their tech support up about questions that actually understand what BGP is and how it works! Bret On Wed, 2009-10-21 at 11:58 -0500, Jon Auer wrote: Cogent has a bad rap but they have been solid for us for the past year. Prior to that they had a few hickups. Their peering is pretty good. Low latency to all major content sites. Level3 seems to have more outages than a provider of their reputation should. Savvis is has poor peering from what I hear. I'd like to add Abovenet or Global crossing to my mix. On 10/21/09, Marco Coelho coelh...@gmail.com wrote: I'm a GigE circuit to the mix, and I've got a choice of: Abovenet Cogent Global Crossing Level3 Savvis I'm looking for recommendations of who the better upstream is. Marco -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -- Sent from my mobile device WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Cogent can be ok, but they are not equal to AboveNET, XO, ATT, Level3 etc... We have multiple upstream GigE feeds and Cogent is one of them. It took us months to get Cogent to resolve a flapping switch or router within their network. After a couple dozen screenshots and trace routes from various looking glass sites they finally conceded. Granted the outages were only between 5 and 60 seconds long when they occurred and rarely were long enough to break BGP sessions, but they were hell on VoIP! It took us less than a day to find the specific Cogent IP or device where the problem was occurring, but months before Cogent acted on the information we provided them. Cogent Support honestly wasn't that bad, but said their hands were tied until management further up the chain completed their investigation. During that time we had to route voice traffic around Cogent as best we could. Cogent is great as a cheap third or fourth GigE upstream, but never a sole or primary Internet feed, IMO. While Cogent goes about their BGP peering a little different than most, I do agree their BGP Support is equal to anyone else's we've worked with. Best, Brad -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Bret Clark Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 1:15 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams I always hear about Cogent having a bad rap, but where does that come from? I can't say that one bit! They've worked great for us and during the initial install clearly went above and beyond the call of duty when we encountered a problem even waking a VP up at 1AM on a Sunday morning because we need to have the circuit up and running by first thing Monday! When I have add to call their tech support up about questions that actually understand what BGP is and how it works! Bret On Wed, 2009-10-21 at 11:58 -0500, Jon Auer wrote: Cogent has a bad rap but they have been solid for us for the past year. Prior to that they had a few hickups. Their peering is pretty good. Low latency to all major content sites. Level3 seems to have more outages than a provider of their reputation should. Savvis is has poor peering from what I hear. I'd like to add Abovenet or Global crossing to my mix. On 10/21/09, Marco Coelho coelh...@gmail.com wrote: I'm a GigE circuit to the mix, and I've got a choice of: Abovenet Cogent Global Crossing Level3 Savvis I'm looking for recommendations of who the better upstream is. Marco -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering. In the DC and NY markets, Cogent has excellent performance and peering, and has shown to outperform EVERY provider we have tried, period. (And yes, some of the carriers we tried were Level3, XO, and Abovenet.) I recognize that Cogent's performance may not be as good for ALL markets where they potentially could have a weaker presence. But saying Cogent is only worthy of the 3rd or 4th transit connection is simply untrue. Cogent's weak point now is internal processes and communication. They've lost touch with the value of having personal Account Reps, and render the reps powerless to manage the accounts, in favor of the customer relationship managed by the clueless billing/collections department. Its a shame. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. But their tech support has been the best by far in the industry, and oversubscription has never been a problem from what I see. In picking a Transit provider its really a decision about where your traffic typically flows, and where you need good performance to. NOT anyone has best performance everywhere. For example, Hurricane has excellent performance AND they are inexpensive. They have a really good peering presensence in CA. I'm not confident that they have nearly as good a presence on the East coast though, but those that have used them on teh east coast that I know have been happy. We were considering using them. Abovenet has great Gig-E Transport. But their transit is expensive, and its because its more expensive for them to provide it, because they are not as well positioned to do it cost effectively, not because its necessarilly better. Level3 as well, has many strength. They have a lot of web host clients. It can really help performance to reach certain sites. Level3 also tends to blocks smaller BGP block announcements, more so than someone like Cogent. Level3 is good for a secondaryu because they usually have diverse routes. Some providers have good performance to France, Amsterdam, India, others dont. Savvis tends to have real peering to NY finacnial markets. I often see Blended bandwdith combining Global Cross and Level3, not sure why these two are chosen as a pair. Maybe its simply becaue they tend to be colocated at the same carrier hotels? But selecting a transit provider is not as simple as saying one is better. My personaly opinion is, find the two lowest cost providers, and then you can afford to buy more bandwidth, and have two options to route customers. You also need to consider the path to where you take it. For example, Cogent remote tenant buildings likely have routers with less ram that cant handle full BGP tables, so they require creating session to two seperate BGP servers (with the second one having full routes.). But of you connect to them inb a major colo center that doesn;t exist. Similar things exist with other providers depending on where you pick up the circuit. What I like about Abovenet, is they'll map out their network for you, so you know exactly what you are buying, so true redunancy can be built into the network design. Cogent is a bit more secrative about the traffic path. XO has had some really good account reps, and I liked that. But for me, they didn't really give me anything exciting as far as price or performance, more than anyone else. It should also be noted that it could make a big difference which local colo you pick the circuit up in also. So when you are evaluating a provider you are also evaluating the venue where the circuit is in. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Brad Belton b...@belwave.com To: bcl...@spectraaccess.com; 'WISPA General List' wireless@wispa.org Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 3:47 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Cogent can be ok, but they are not equal to AboveNET, XO, ATT, Level3 etc... We have multiple upstream GigE feeds and Cogent is one of them. It took us months to get Cogent to resolve a flapping switch or router within their network. After a couple dozen screenshots and trace routes from various looking glass sites they finally conceded. Granted the outages were only between 5 and 60 seconds long when they occurred and rarely were long enough to break BGP sessions, but they were hell on VoIP! It took us less than a day to find the specific Cogent IP or device where the problem was occurring, but months before Cogent acted on the information we provided them. Cogent Support honestly wasn't that bad, but said their hands were tied until management further up the chain completed their investigation. During that time we had to route voice traffic around Cogent as best we could. Cogent is great as a cheap
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Isn't XO a Level3 reseller? Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373 When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. --- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.netwrote: It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering. In the DC and NY markets, Cogent has excellent performance and peering, and has shown to outperform EVERY provider we have tried, period. (And yes, some of the carriers we tried were Level3, XO, and Abovenet.) I recognize that Cogent's performance may not be as good for ALL markets where they potentially could have a weaker presence. But saying Cogent is only worthy of the 3rd or 4th transit connection is simply untrue. Cogent's weak point now is internal processes and communication. They've lost touch with the value of having personal Account Reps, and render the reps powerless to manage the accounts, in favor of the customer relationship managed by the clueless billing/collections department. Its a shame. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. But their tech support has been the best by far in the industry, and oversubscription has never been a problem from what I see. In picking a Transit provider its really a decision about where your traffic typically flows, and where you need good performance to. NOT anyone has best performance everywhere. For example, Hurricane has excellent performance AND they are inexpensive. They have a really good peering presensence in CA. I'm not confident that they have nearly as good a presence on the East coast though, but those that have used them on teh east coast that I know have been happy. We were considering using them. Abovenet has great Gig-E Transport. But their transit is expensive, and its because its more expensive for them to provide it, because they are not as well positioned to do it cost effectively, not because its necessarilly better. Level3 as well, has many strength. They have a lot of web host clients. It can really help performance to reach certain sites. Level3 also tends to blocks smaller BGP block announcements, more so than someone like Cogent. Level3 is good for a secondaryu because they usually have diverse routes. Some providers have good performance to France, Amsterdam, India, others dont. Savvis tends to have real peering to NY finacnial markets. I often see Blended bandwdith combining Global Cross and Level3, not sure why these two are chosen as a pair. Maybe its simply becaue they tend to be colocated at the same carrier hotels? But selecting a transit provider is not as simple as saying one is better. My personaly opinion is, find the two lowest cost providers, and then you can afford to buy more bandwidth, and have two options to route customers. You also need to consider the path to where you take it. For example, Cogent remote tenant buildings likely have routers with less ram that cant handle full BGP tables, so they require creating session to two seperate BGP servers (with the second one having full routes.). But of you connect to them inb a major colo center that doesn;t exist. Similar things exist with other providers depending on where you pick up the circuit. What I like about Abovenet, is they'll map out their network for you, so you know exactly what you are buying, so true redunancy can be built into the network design. Cogent is a bit more secrative about the traffic path. XO has had some really good account reps, and I liked that. But for me, they didn't really give me anything exciting as far as price or performance, more than anyone else. It should also be noted that it could make a big difference which local colo you pick the circuit up in also. So when you are evaluating a provider you are also evaluating the venue where the circuit is in. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Brad Belton b...@belwave.com To: bcl...@spectraaccess.com; 'WISPA General List' wireless@wispa.org Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 3:47 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Cogent can be ok, but they are not equal to AboveNET, XO, ATT, Level3 etc... We have multiple upstream GigE feeds and Cogent is one of them. It took us months to get Cogent to resolve a flapping switch or router within their network. After a couple dozen screenshots and trace routes from various looking glass sites they finally conceded. Granted the outages were only between 5 and 60 seconds long when they occurred and rarely were long enough to break BGP sessions, but they were hell on VoIP! It took us less than a day to find the specific Cogent
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
While I agree no solution can be considered equal in any given location, there are trends or a general barometer to help place one carrier over another. This is the reality that typically puts Cogent towards the back of the bus in most people's minds. The biggest proponents of Cogent are those that are largely dependent on Cogent due to any number of reasons. Budget constraints, lack of alternate higher quality peer availability etc, etc. Cogent makes no excuse promoting themselves as the low end, budget driven bottom dollar provider. They are good for what they offer, but again not what a network administrator looking for high availability is going to pick as a first choice. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. This is exactly my point (being made by Tom, a Cogent customer!) why Cogent should not be depended on as a sole or primary Internet feed. If Cogent's all you got then you're SOL! Bottom line is any carrier can break. If you can only have one then find one that breaks the least. If you can have more than one, Cogent is a good low cost second or third to have in a pinch for relatively little cost. Best, Brad -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Tom DeReggi Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 4:28 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering. In the DC and NY markets, Cogent has excellent performance and peering, and has shown to outperform EVERY provider we have tried, period. (And yes, some of the carriers we tried were Level3, XO, and Abovenet.) I recognize that Cogent's performance may not be as good for ALL markets where they potentially could have a weaker presence. But saying Cogent is only worthy of the 3rd or 4th transit connection is simply untrue. Cogent's weak point now is internal processes and communication. They've lost touch with the value of having personal Account Reps, and render the reps powerless to manage the accounts, in favor of the customer relationship managed by the clueless billing/collections department. Its a shame. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. But their tech support has been the best by far in the industry, and oversubscription has never been a problem from what I see. In picking a Transit provider its really a decision about where your traffic typically flows, and where you need good performance to. NOT anyone has best performance everywhere. For example, Hurricane has excellent performance AND they are inexpensive. They have a really good peering presensence in CA. I'm not confident that they have nearly as good a presence on the East coast though, but those that have used them on teh east coast that I know have been happy. We were considering using them. Abovenet has great Gig-E Transport. But their transit is expensive, and its because its more expensive for them to provide it, because they are not as well positioned to do it cost effectively, not because its necessarilly better. Level3 as well, has many strength. They have a lot of web host clients. It can really help performance to reach certain sites. Level3 also tends to blocks smaller BGP block announcements, more so than someone like Cogent. Level3 is good for a secondaryu because they usually have diverse routes. Some providers have good performance to France, Amsterdam, India, others dont. Savvis tends to have real peering to NY finacnial markets. I often see Blended bandwdith combining Global Cross and Level3, not sure why these two are chosen as a pair. Maybe its simply becaue they tend to be colocated at the same carrier hotels? But selecting a transit provider is not as simple as saying one is better. My personaly opinion is, find the two lowest cost providers, and then you can afford to buy more bandwidth, and have two options to route customers. You also need to consider the path to where you take it. For example, Cogent remote tenant buildings likely have routers with less ram that cant handle full BGP tables, so they require creating session to two seperate BGP servers (with the second one having full routes.). But of you connect to them inb a major colo center that doesn;t exist. Similar things exist with other providers depending on where you pick up the circuit. What I like about Abovenet, is they'll map out their network for you, so you know exactly what you are buying, so true redunancy can be built into the network design. Cogent is a bit more secrative about the traffic path. XO has had some really good account reps, and I liked that. But for me, they didn't really give me anything exciting as far as price or performance, more
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Brad Belton wrote: While I agree no solution can be considered equal in any given location, there are trends or a general barometer to help place one carrier over another. Such as? This is exactly my point (being made by Tom, a Cogent customer!) why Cogent should not be depended on as a sole or primary Internet feed. If Cogent's all you got then you're SOL! Baloney, we've used them as one of our primary's for well over a year without hiccup. Our so other better providers have given us more frustration. Bottom line is any carrier can break. If you can only have one then find one that breaks the least. If you can have more than one, Cogent is a good low cost second or third to have in a pinch for relatively little cost. Where are you getting your data from? Curious as to why you feel they are a second or third alternative? Bret WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
As we can all see, This is very dependent on market. Bret here has had a great time with cogent, where others are quick to say its a lesser provider. Arguing which carrier has better uptime is a waste of time. Long story short, Pick what is the best in that market. You might even get away with looking up some of the big company's in your city, and if they peer with someone you might also want to peer with (like cogent). Give them a call and see if you can get a tech, see what they have to say about $CARRIER in your area. They might tell you to jump in a lake, but you might get someone cool who is willing to talk. Nick Olsen Brevard Wireless (321) 205-1100 x106 From: Bret Clark bcl...@spectraaccess.com Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 6:10 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Brad Belton wrote: While I agree no solution can be considered equal in any given location, there are trends or a general barometer to help place one carrier over another. Such as? This is exactly my point (being made by Tom, a Cogent customer!) why Cogent should not be depended on as a sole or primary Internet feed. If Cogent's all you got then you're SOL! Baloney, we've used them as one of our primary's for well over a year without hiccup. Our so other better providers have given us more frustration. Bottom line is any carrier can break. If you can only have one then find one that breaks the least. If you can have more than one, Cogent is a good low cost second or third to have in a pinch for relatively little cost. Where are you getting your data from? Curious as to why you feel they are a second or third alternative? Bret WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Hello Bret, You missed the point about the biggest proponents of Cogent are those that only have Cogentsilence... Spectraaccess ASN: 36645 http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS36645 http://bgplay.routeviews.org/bgplay/208.65.172.0/22 208.82.132.0/22 Tom appears to be in the same boat: Rapiddsl ASN: 12214 http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS12214 http://bgplay.routeviews.org/bgplay/69.46.240.0/20 I'm not a Cogent basher as we have a Cogent GigE feed too and at times have depended on it, but I among many, many others do not consider Cogent as an equal to a variety of other providers. I'm not making this up it's just a well known fact. Cogent gets de-peered with others on a far more frequent basis than any other major provider. Just Google cogent depeered vs. abovenet depeered or level3 depeered. There is no comparison. So, what are you going to do when your customers are calling asking why they can't get to a particular site? All because you're caught up in some pissing match between carriers. I know our clients don't care what the reason is, they are more interested in what we're going to do to fix it. If Cogent is all you got then you're SOL! Again, the bottom line is any carrier can break. If you can only have one then find one that breaks the least...that may very well be Cogent in your particular area, but not in most cases. If you can have more than one, Cogent is a good low cost second or third to have as a complement to your network. Best, Brad -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Bret Clark Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 5:10 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Brad Belton wrote: While I agree no solution can be considered equal in any given location, there are trends or a general barometer to help place one carrier over another. Such as? This is exactly my point (being made by Tom, a Cogent customer!) why Cogent should not be depended on as a sole or primary Internet feed. If Cogent's all you got then you're SOL! Baloney, we've used them as one of our primary's for well over a year without hiccup. Our so other better providers have given us more frustration. Bottom line is any carrier can break. If you can only have one then find one that breaks the least. If you can have more than one, Cogent is a good low cost second or third to have in a pinch for relatively little cost. Where are you getting your data from? Curious as to why you feel they are a second or third alternative? Bret -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Brad Belton Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 5:01 PM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams While I agree no solution can be considered equal in any given location, there are trends or a general barometer to help place one carrier over another. This is the reality that typically puts Cogent towards the back of the bus in most people's minds. The biggest proponents of Cogent are those that are largely dependent on Cogent due to any number of reasons. Budget constraints, lack of alternate higher quality peer availability etc, etc. Cogent makes no excuse promoting themselves as the low end, budget driven bottom dollar provider. They are good for what they offer, but again not what a network administrator looking for high availability is going to pick as a first choice. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. This is exactly my point (being made by Tom, a Cogent customer!) why Cogent should not be depended on as a sole or primary Internet feed. If Cogent's all you got then you're SOL! Bottom line is any carrier can break. If you can only have one then find one that breaks the least. If you can have more than one, Cogent is a good low cost second or third to have in a pinch for relatively little cost. Best, Brad -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Tom DeReggi Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 4:28 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering. In the DC and NY markets, Cogent has excellent performance and peering, and has shown to outperform EVERY provider we have tried, period. (And yes, some of the carriers we tried were Level3, XO, and Abovenet.) I recognize that Cogent's performance may not be as good for ALL markets where they potentially could have a weaker presence. But saying Cogent is only worthy of the 3rd or 4th transit connection is simply untrue. Cogent's weak point now is internal processes and communication. They've lost touch with the value
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
With any provider, you should have a BGP mix. Cogent has had peering disputes with some of the bigger networks over the years. If you were multi-homed, you had no problem. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- From: Bret Clark bcl...@spectraaccess.com Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 1:15 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams I always hear about Cogent having a bad rap, but where does that come from? I can't say that one bit! They've worked great for us and during the initial install clearly went above and beyond the call of duty when we encountered a problem even waking a VP up at 1AM on a Sunday morning because we need to have the circuit up and running by first thing Monday! When I have add to call their tech support up about questions that actually understand what BGP is and how it works! Bret On Wed, 2009-10-21 at 11:58 -0500, Jon Auer wrote: Cogent has a bad rap but they have been solid for us for the past year. Prior to that they had a few hickups. Their peering is pretty good. Low latency to all major content sites. Level3 seems to have more outages than a provider of their reputation should. Savvis is has poor peering from what I hear. I'd like to add Abovenet or Global crossing to my mix. On 10/21/09, Marco Coelho coelh...@gmail.com wrote: I'm a GigE circuit to the mix, and I've got a choice of: Abovenet Cogent Global Crossing Level3 Savvis I'm looking for recommendations of who the better upstream is. Marco -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Tom, Can you explain how you tested that Cogent "outperformed" every other provider? The only way I know to test that is to actually have all those providers, running full BGP routes to your router and seeing where the traffic goes. Is that how you tested? Travis Microserv Tom DeReggi wrote: It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering. In the DC and NY markets, Cogent has excellent performance and peering, and has shown to outperform EVERY provider we have tried, period. (And yes, some of the carriers we tried were Level3, XO, and Abovenet.) I recognize that Cogent's performance "may" not be as good for ALL markets where they potentially could have a weaker presence. But saying Cogent is only worthy of the 3rd or 4th transit connection is simply untrue. Cogent's weak point now is internal processes and communication. They've lost touch with the value of having personal Account Reps, and render the reps powerless to manage the accounts, in favor of the customer relationship managed by the clueless billing/collections department. Its a shame. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. But their tech support has been the best by far in the industry, and oversubscription has never been a problem from what I see. In picking a Transit provider its really a decision about where your traffic typically flows, and where you need good performance to. NOT anyone has best performance everywhere. For example, Hurricane has excellent performance AND they are inexpensive. They have a really good peering presensence in CA. I'm not confident that they have nearly as good a presence on the East coast though, but those that have used them on teh east coast that I know have been happy. We were considering using them. Abovenet has great Gig-E Transport. But their transit is expensive, and its because its more expensive for them to provide it, because they are not as well positioned to do it cost effectively, not because its necessarilly better. Level3 as well, has many strength. They have a lot of web host clients. It can really help performance to reach certain sites. Level3 also tends to blocks smaller BGP block announcements, more so than someone like Cogent. Level3 is good for a secondaryu because they usually have diverse routes. Some providers have good performance to France, Amsterdam, India, others dont. Savvis tends to have real peering to NY finacnial markets. I often see Blended bandwdith combining Global Cross and Level3, not sure why these two are chosen as a pair. Maybe its simply becaue they tend to be colocated at the same carrier hotels? But selecting a transit provider is not as simple as saying one is better. My personaly opinion is, find the two lowest cost providers, and then you can afford to buy more bandwidth, and have two options to route customers. You also need to consider the path to where you take it. For example, Cogent remote tenant buildings likely have routers with less ram that cant handle full BGP tables, so they require creating session to two seperate BGP servers (with the second one having full routes.). But of you connect to them inb a major colo center that doesn;t exist. Similar things exist with other providers depending on where you pick up the circuit. What I like about Abovenet, is they'll map out their network for you, so you know exactly what you are buying, so true redunancy can be built into the network design. Cogent is a bit more secrative about the traffic path. XO has had some really good account reps, and I liked that. But for me, they didn't really give me anything exciting as far as price or performance, more than anyone else. It should also be noted that it could make a big difference which local colo you pick the circuit up in also. So when you are evaluating a provider you are also evaluating the venue where the circuit is in. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: "Brad Belton" b...@belwave.com To: bcl...@spectraaccess.com; "'WISPA General List'" wireless@wispa.org Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 3:47 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Cogent can be ok, but they are not equal to AboveNET, XO, ATT, Level3 etc... We have multiple upstream GigE feeds and Cogent is one of them. It took us months to get Cogent to resolve a flapping switch or router within their network. After a couple dozen screenshots and trace routes from various looking glass sites they finally conceded. Granted the outages were only between 5 and 60 seconds long when they occurred and rarely were long enough to break BGP sessions, but they were hell on VoIP! It took us less than a day to find the specific Cogent IP or device where the
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Brad Belton wrote: Hello Bret, You missed the point about the biggest proponents of Cogent are those that only have Cogentsilence... We prepend our other peers, because Cogent has been the most stable and latency/jitter the lowest. So I don't get you point... I'm not a Cogent basher as we have a Cogent GigE feed too and at times have depended on it, but I among many, many others do not consider Cogent as an equal to a variety of other providers. I'm not making this up it's just a well known fact. ' But you are bashing them. Besides they all have their skeletons and I've been involved with many of them on those skeletons. Recently had to stop announcing routes to ATT because of continuous route flaps. Try to get a hold of someone at ATT who has 1/2 clue. Cogent gets de-peered with others on a far more frequent basis than any other major provider. Just Google cogent depeered vs. abovenet depeered or level3 depeered. There is no comparison. Does this fall into the category of If its on the Internet is must be true? :). I won't disagree that Cogent seems to get depeered more often recently with Sprint last year, but if Cogent is taking business away from the other tier providers, I could see some of them trying to flex their muscles by pulling the depeering card. But I guess if you want to bash Cogent, I haven't been happy with how they are handling IP6 right now. So, what are you going to do when your customers are calling asking why they can't get to a particular site? All because you're caught up in some pissing match between carriers. I know our clients don't care what the reason is, they are more interested in what we're going to do to fix it. If Cogent is all you got then you're SOL! Regardless of our point of views, if you anyone is going to offer Internet services to customers, you should never have just one upstream connection. Additionally I find too many people have opinions of a provider based on there personal experience in a particular region. Cogent works great out of the Boston NAP and I know numerous other providers who would state the same. Maybe in you location that's not true. Bret WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Brad, Once again I disagree. Cogent represents themselves as low cost, but they have never represented themselves as low quality. Second, Cogent is most ideal as the FIRST PRIMARY provider, because Cogent is higher performing, and faster speed connections are more affordable. I agree, a backup secondary provider is needed to help when there are short outages. The backup providers dont need to be as high a capacity, or as quality, as they are seldom used exempt in the rare emergencies. Third, What determines how inexpensive a Transit provider is has nothing to do with Quality, it has to do with who has more settlement free peers. Cogent costs less, because Cogent has to pay fewer other ISPs for capacity. This DOES NOT mean they use low quality public peering, it means that they have more quality private peering negotiated at better terms. Bottom line is any carrier can break That, I agree with. Which is why its important to have two upstreams. But, that is not a reason to not buy Cogent first. By buying Cogent first it allows a provider to become more profitable sooner, and therefore able to afford sooner multiple upstreams. Its also depends on what the downstream offers in its value proposition. With Cogent, I offer my custoemrs Gig-E when others can offer 100mb. With Cogent, I can offer my customers half the price, if not 1/3rd the price that my tier2 competitiors can offer. With Cogent, I offer excellent performance, better than most, most of the time, and if they get an outage so what. Is it really better to have less good performance all the time, to gain .009 better uptime? That depends on the target client base of the WISP. You also got another thing right... I am largely dependant on Cogent, and I hate that. But its relevent to ask why I'm dependant? When I first started out, it was because of price, but not anymore. I'm dependant on Cogent because its really hard to find a Tier1 Carrier that can offer anywhere near as equivellent consistent performance and tech support. My customers really noticed, everytime I tried someone else, so someone else never lastest. Note that I did not say uptime, I said performance. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Brad Belton b...@belwave.com To: 'WISPA General List' wireless@wispa.org Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 6:01 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams While I agree no solution can be considered equal in any given location, there are trends or a general barometer to help place one carrier over another. This is the reality that typically puts Cogent towards the back of the bus in most people's minds. The biggest proponents of Cogent are those that are largely dependent on Cogent due to any number of reasons. Budget constraints, lack of alternate higher quality peer availability etc, etc. Cogent makes no excuse promoting themselves as the low end, budget driven bottom dollar provider. They are good for what they offer, but again not what a network administrator looking for high availability is going to pick as a first choice. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. This is exactly my point (being made by Tom, a Cogent customer!) why Cogent should not be depended on as a sole or primary Internet feed. If Cogent's all you got then you're SOL! Bottom line is any carrier can break. If you can only have one then find one that breaks the least. If you can have more than one, Cogent is a good low cost second or third to have in a pinch for relatively little cost. Best, Brad -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Tom DeReggi Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 4:28 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering. In the DC and NY markets, Cogent has excellent performance and peering, and has shown to outperform EVERY provider we have tried, period. (And yes, some of the carriers we tried were Level3, XO, and Abovenet.) I recognize that Cogent's performance may not be as good for ALL markets where they potentially could have a weaker presence. But saying Cogent is only worthy of the 3rd or 4th transit connection is simply untrue. Cogent's weak point now is internal processes and communication. They've lost touch with the value of having personal Account Reps, and render the reps powerless to manage the accounts, in favor of the customer relationship managed by the clueless billing/collections department. Its a shame. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. But their tech support has been the best
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Nathan, Like your perspective. I'll say the reason that I admit that I have had some uptime issues is that. I once had an ATT- T1, that never had a single outage or degregation in the 4 years that we had it. NOT one. It was special to have that experience, and see something so reliable over time, that simply could be relied on. Some people have that high of a standard. For example, I bet the NY Stock Exchange would pay about anything to guarantee 4 years of ZERO downtime. But, in my opinon we no longer live in that age. Networks are getting complicated. We are in the age of SHARED infrastructure. All it takes is a single config mistake for a new sub, and a metro network can accidentally be taken down. Short outages now and then are tolerable and to be expected on any carriers network, and Carriers expect tier2/3 ISPs to have backup transits. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Nathan Stooke nstooke...@wisperisp.com To: 'WISPA General List' wireless@wispa.org Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 6:33 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Hello, I know when we where shopping for bandwidth all of the other providers said Cogent was bad yet almost all of Cogent customers said they were great!! You have to take into account the bias of the person that started the rumor. We have had cogent for almost 3 years. 2 times have we gone down. First, for 30 min, was the part failing and the second, 3 hours, was replacing the part after it failed a second time. Their support is great and they know their stuff. No matter who you chose to go with 2 providers is better than 1. However, we still only have one for cost and the given track record of Cogent. -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Nick Olsen Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 5:24 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams As we can all see, This is very dependent on market. Bret here has had a great time with cogent, where others are quick to say its a lesser provider. Arguing which carrier has better uptime is a waste of time. Long story short, Pick what is the best in that market. You might even get away with looking up some of the big company's in your city, and if they peer with someone you might also want to peer with (like cogent). Give them a call and see if you can get a tech, see what they have to say about $CARRIER in your area. They might tell you to jump in a lake, but you might get someone cool who is willing to talk. Nick Olsen Brevard Wireless (321) 205-1100 x106 From: Bret Clark bcl...@spectraaccess.com Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 6:10 PM To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Brad Belton wrote: While I agree no solution can be considered equal in any given location, there are trends or a general barometer to help place one carrier over another. Such as? This is exactly my point (being made by Tom, a Cogent customer!) why Cogent should not be depended on as a sole or primary Internet feed. If Cogent's all you got then you're SOL! Baloney, we've used them as one of our primary's for well over a year without hiccup. Our so other better providers have given us more frustration. Bottom line is any carrier can break. If you can only have one then find one that breaks the least. If you can have more than one, Cogent is a good low cost second or third to have in a pinch for relatively little cost. Where are you getting your data from? Curious as to why you feel they are a second or third alternative? Bret WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
Isn't XO a Level3 reseller? I dont know, they could be in some markets. But what I can tell you is that XO does own their own national fiber backbone that covers some US markets. But that brings up a new topic about why some can be more cost competitive in certain areas. It really boils down to what assets they have strong in that market. I like to use a specific real world example of mine. I'll leave out the exact locations, to respect vendor. The path is from point A (NOC) to Point B (Neutral Carrier Hotel.) Above.net owns the fiber to the PointA building. Cogent buy's Above.net's dark fiber to deliver our transit service. Prices below are per month. Above.net DarkFiber- $8k per month Above.net Gig-E transport from PointA to PointB- $2k Above.net 200mbps Transit at PointB -$2k Above.net 200mbps Transit delivered to PointA - $4k Cogent Gig-E transit at PointA- $4k Cogent 200mbps transit at PointA- $1600 Cogent Gig-E transport from Point A to Point B- $6k Cogent 100mbps PTP PointA to B- $1k XO transit 100mbps PointA - $3000k (because they have to pay more for transport to that site) Those above prices make absolutely no sense. Why is it? The most expensive service offers the less (dark fiber). Itsclear why, when abovenet sees Cogent's selling retail lower than the dark fiber owner, and a desire to prevent that situation from replicating to more competitors. Cogent's fiber costs are very minimal. The biggest cost to both the Tier1 carriers is peering cross connects. They are $300 per Cross connect. EVEN if the peer only passes 10mbps of traffic on average. Cogent does way higher volume in the region, therefore divides that cost of all peering connection by those higher number of connections, and develops a lower cost for peering per subscriber. Therefore Cogent can afford more peers at the site. As they get more peers, their transit cost go down. But Cogent's volume gets large enough that their transit becomes cheap enough, that they can charge me less for it, than selling me the transport without the transit. Its worth it to them, to own my Transit, even if not being compensated for it, because it discourages customers from peering with others. My point here is, the priciing in this example has nothing to do with quality, it has to do with volume at a particular venue or market. Whoever gained more momentum has the potential to offer lower price, quality of the network design never really enters into the equation. Cogents strategy has always been to low ball price to gain more momentum, and control more traffic, to negotiate lower peering costs. My second point is, these costs dont consider Colocation costs. It was determined that Colocation and peering really does not pay off until one is doing over 1GB of traffic, if reason for colo is to save cost by peering. So if doing under a gig, comparing carriers is about the cost comparison at PointA. ISPs get locked into an upstream Tier1 because of their position to remote facilities. If doing over 1GB, well, then its a different game, because all carriers are closer positioned at that Carrier Neutral hotel, and there are different metric for differentiation. But there are so many scenarios today, its near impossbile to predict who will offer better bandwdith, before trying it. Even Resellers now can offer better performance sometimes than the tier1. When a fiber line between NewYork and DC can be had with only a added 1-2ms of latency, its leaves room for games to reduce cost. One game is to peer at Carrier Hotels with low cost Cross Connects, where its $100/mon, and then Transport all the traffic back to a central source where one does it s primary high capacity peers. The performance degregation of the extra hop is often unnoticeable. Again, cost comes back to how much volume can be sold by that reseller from that venue. IF enough Tranffic can be offloaded to peering, only a small percentage of traffic needs to be split between a couple upstream transit providers. My recommendation is to always do a short term contract the first time you try a new provider at a specific venue, then after shown thats it performs well, upgrade to long term contract to reduce cost. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Josh Luthman j...@imaginenetworksllc.com To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 5:31 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Isn't XO a Level3 reseller? Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373 When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. --- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Tom DeReggi wirelessn...@rapiddsl.netwrote: It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering
Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams
by side comparisons to sites they said they accessed most. The challenge with testing is that testing latency is not the only meaning ful data. Whats also relevent to test is the packetloss and throughput end to end to key places. To do that it requires an uninhibited qualified envi ronment to transfer files or run things like Iperf from. Sometimes we do this by taking advantage of other locations that our large customers might have, and we'll remote desktop in, and test away with Jperf. I cant tell you who has the best uptime, Because Cogent is the only one that we have non-stop for many years. But measuring performance is a quick process. Can I measure average performance over a period of time and report it, NO. But my customers can. They switch to us, and they either experience better or worse performance in general perception, and I always ask, and they tell me what they really think. And sometimes our customers switch from us, and then switch back because they missed out high performance. Lastly, if I said Cogent outperforms all other providers, I didn't mean that. What I did mean is that, based on teh providers we tried, Cogent had felt to perform better on average than the other carriers we tried in those envirnments, based on tests we ran at that time. It should also be considered the reason this thread got my attention. I did not start out saying Cogent was the Best. I said Cogent was not second rate. All that really matters is the choices where I hadCogent, I compared to my other choice at that site, and Cogent won for that location. I dont have to prove Cogent is BEst in the World to everyone to prove my original point that Cogent is a high quality provider in many cases. And that I have not been exposed to a compelling reason to justify switching, based on performance. One more lastly, I'd argue that the changes in the Internet eco system changes who has better performance. For example, US bandwidth providers have excellent price/performance because they have signifcant influence in the market. This is because they control a large part of the world's hosting (specifically areas like LA and Ashburn). As different colo centers gain more market share it can change what ISPs have better performance. It really doesn't matter how good a network someone has, if the traffic is forced to take a specific route, that route determined performance. Global Routing is very complicated, and to say one provider has it mastered well beyond others would be rediculous. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Travis Johnson To: WISPA General List Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 8:42 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] choice of upstreams Tom, Can you explain how you tested that Cogent outperformed every other provider? The only way I know to test that is to actually have all those providers, running full BGP routes to your router and seeing where the traffic goes. Is that how you tested? Travis Microserv Tom DeReggi wrote: It should be noted that an Upstreams performance can be directly proportional to the location where they have more peering. In the DC and NY markets, Cogent has excellent performance and peering, and has shown to outperform EVERY provider we have tried, period. (And yes, some of the carriers we tried were Level3, XO, and Abovenet.) I recognize that Cogent's performance may not be as good for ALL markets where they potentially could have a weaker presence. But saying Cogent is only worthy of the 3rd or 4th transit connection is simply untrue. Cogent's weak point now is internal processes and communication. They've lost touch with the value of having personal Account Reps, and render the reps powerless to manage the accounts, in favor of the customer relationship managed by the clueless billing/collections department. Its a shame. You might even get away with saying Cogent has a few more short duration (less than 15 minutes?) outages than other carriers. But their tech support has been the best by far in the industry, and oversubscription has never been a problem from what I see. In picking a Transit provider its really a decision about where your traffic typically flows, and where you need good performance to. NOT anyone has best performance everywhere. For example, Hurricane has excellent performance AND they are inexpensive. They have a really good peering presensence in CA. I'm not confident that they have nearly as good a presence on the East coast though, but those that have used them on teh east coast that I know have been happy. We were considering using them. Abovenet has great Gig-E Transport. But their transit is expensive, and its because its more expensive for them to provide it, because they are not as well positioned to do it cost effectively, not because its necessarilly better. Level3 as well, has many strength
