On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Robin Rodriguez<rrodrig...@ifbyphone.com> wrote: > I don't have any usage experience, but would be very interested from anyone > who does as well. We have spoken with them about long-haul circuits (with > small to no commit) and their prices are indeed incredible. The prices we > heard were for Equinix to Equinix circuits (specifically CHI1 & CHI3 to DAL1 > & NJ2) they also quoted us great deals on resold IBX-link to get to IBX's > that they don't have a physical presence in (they aren't in CHI3 for > example). I do wonder how they can undercut everyone's price by such a > margin. Were you seeing great quotes into non Equinix facilities?
Simple, they're oversubscribing their transport circuits and letting users fight for bandwidth. Basically what they're doing is buying a 10GE unprotected wavelength from a carrier, dropping a switch on the ends, and loading up multiple customer VLANs onto the circuit. There are no bandwidth controls, no reservations, no traffic engineering, nothing to keep and the circuit uncongested, and these are unprotected waves so they go down on a regular basis whenever their carrier does a maintenance. How they implement multi-point service is even scarier, they just slap all your locations into one big VLAN and let unknown unicast flooding and MAC learning sort it out. Most serious customers run screaming, I'm sure you can find some former customers who can describe the horror in more detail off-list. When things break, their support is nothing to write home about. They often brag that they have a former Level3 engineer on payroll, unfortunately he's nowhere to be found, and their suport people aren't terribly sharp on those rare occasoions when they *do* answer the phone or respond to e-mail. Like someone else pointed out, multi-day outages aren't at all uncommon, so if you end up going with Bandcon, make sure you have sufficient redundancy in place. Since they can't really compete on quality, they compete instead on price. Their sales force spams and cold-calls every website, ARIN, peeringdb, etc on a regular basis, and can't take "no" for an answer. The following exchange sums it up nicely (warning: foul language): http://attrition.org/postal/z/034/0931.html They are currently running a $2.50/mg transit promotion, which makes me wonder how they're doing on their Level3 and Global Crossing bandwidth commits and whether or not they're solvent. Drive Slow, Paul Wall
