Scott Howard wrote:
We're looking at getting connectivity via Level 3 in a particular
datacenter, but we're being told that it's "legacy Wiltel/Looking Glass"
rather than "true" Level 3.
Given that both of these acquisitions occurred years ago should I be
worried, or is this "legacy" connectivity the same as L3 at any other
datacenter?
We were initially homed to the old Telcove network. Never had any
trouble with those guys. When Level3 bought them they canned all the
local IP folks. That forced you to work with the remaining overworked
IP folks back on the East coast (Angela and a guy who's name I forget).
Their local transport techs are good but there are very few of them
left now, as compared to seeing dozens of their trucks roam the streets
daily.
We eventually asked to be moved off of 19094 and onto 3356. The extra
Telcove hop made for some less preferred and inefficient routing. All
they did was extend 3356 to the local 7600 though. The single Wichita
7600 gets on the old ring in a very fugly way. Working != correct,
proper, reliable or SP-grade.
We just turned up a new 200Mbps circuit to them. Wichita was flagged as
not allowing any more high-speed circuits so they provisioned our
circuit on a new ring to St Louis. I'm actually glad that's the case.
I'm hoping that it's more stable than the KC-Wichita-Houston-Dallas
ring has been in the past. We had several complete and partial outages
(read: dozen plus in 2 years time) on that ring. The most recent was a
few months ago when we suddenly lost all but about 2000 routes from L3.
I spent close to 6 hours on that problem in the wee hours, trying to
get someone to diagnose the issue.
When we turned up the new 200Mbps circuit we asked for a way to do a
speedtest on it. We got nothing. Apparently L3 forced Telcove to take
down their own speedtest site which were pointed to after we turned up
the 100Mbps circuit. L3 apparently doesn't offer a speedtest site of
their own. I find that to be completely unacceptable. Every time we
tried to take this position we got the same old line of "we've got
everything in the path configured correctly; you'll get the full
200Mbps" to which I'd reply with a reminder that we got the same
assurance when we turned up the 100Mbps with them a year prior only to
later discover a cap of around 50Mbps somewhere in the middle. Our
account team's hands are tied. There isn't anything that they can do
about it. I've got it documented in email so if we suddenly flatline
again at some percentage under 100% we'll raise an unholy hell with them.
We've also had significant problems getting some planned maintenance
notifications after the fact (ie, after the window and what appears like
an outage to us).
YMMV but if I had the choice I'd try to get connected to the real L3
backbone and not that of an acquisition. The acquisition networks were
probably much more reliable before they got bought. Now that they've
been stripped of their resources the legacy edges are showing signs of
old age, alzheimer's, and senile dementia. It's a shame to see them
reduced to that.
Justin
