My name is Todd Braning, I work on the technical side of the BandCon
house. I am afraid Paul's email is inaccurate.
Here are a few facts:
BandCon offers transport services that can be configured as
unprotected or protected. If you buy an unprotected circuit, and the
underlying transport has issues, your VC will have issues. However
that is not the case if you purchase a protected service.
BandCon does not "just slap all your locations into one big VLAN and
let unknown unicast flooding and MAC learning sort it out". All
circuits are provisioned as separate point to point MPLS VCs. We do,
in fact, utilize traffic engineering and do not oversubscribe our
wavelengths.
Regarding our NOC. It is true that in the past, our NOC was sub par.
This is no longer the case. About a year ago we replaced all NOC
technicians, brought in an experienced NOC manager and have made
significant progress.
Paul - I cannot find you in our customer database so I am not sure
what services you bought from BandCon. However, I would be happy to
speak with you, or anyone else interested, regarding the technical
merits of our transport services. If anyone is interested, please
contact me.
In a former life, I used Bandcon for point to point transport between POPs.
We did not use them for IP Transit.
I found Bandcon to be professional, responsive, and their technical design
and delivery quality very high.
Problems were extremely rare, and when they occurred they were dealt with
promptly.
I won't get involved in a point by point debate, as Todd seems to have set
the record reasonably straight and I trust happy customers will step up to
the plate, but I found them to be a positive vendor that stuck to their
contracts and delivered what they said they would deliver.
It's good to hear that you've listened to feedback and made these key
operational operational changes. I wish you the best of luck going
foward. Please keep in mind that I wasn't trying to smear your
company, but rather provide the original poster with real-word
feedback on a particular vendor whose customers I've worked with many
times over. It would be great if you could stay on the list and join
us in future discussions.
Keeping things topical for the NANOG list, could you tell us a little
more about BandCon's transport offering as relates to backbone
policy? Is IP transit traffic preferenced over your PWEs, or the
other way around, or are they both FIFO'd? What TE, QoS policy, and
signaling/congestion controls have you deployed to deal with multiple
customers purchasing 10G pipes and competing for access to a single
10G path between metros? Do you have a general policy on
oversubscription ratios you'd be able to share without going into
NDA'ed territory?
Also on-topic, I know a lot of community members have voiced RECENT
concern with the relentless tactics of your sales force, some of it
bordering on CAN-SPAM violation and criminal harassment. Could you
speak a little bit to what you're doing to bring this under control?
Would it be a problem if people mail you off-list with any specific
problems they've encountered there?
As stated in my last post, I am happy to discuss the technical merits
of BandCon’s products with any individual. However, I think most
here will concur, this is not the proper platform for such
discussions.
On a personal note, I have been an active NANOG participant for over
10 years and don’t see that changing anytime soon.
My name is Todd Braning, I work on the technical side of the BandCon
house. I am afraid Paul's email is inaccurate.
Yo Todd!
It's good to hear that you've listened to feedback and made these key
operational operational changes. I wish you the best of luck going
foward. Please keep in mind that I wasn't trying to smear your
company, but rather provide the original poster with real-word
feedback on a particular vendor whose customers I've worked with many
times over. It would be great if you could stay on the list and join
us in future discussions.
Keeping things topical for the NANOG list, could you tell us a little
more about BandCon's transport offering as relates to backbone
policy? Is IP transit traffic preferenced over your PWEs, or the
other way around, or are they both FIFO'd? What TE, QoS policy, and
signaling/congestion controls have you deployed to deal with multiple
customers purchasing 10G pipes and competing for access to a single
10G path between metros? Do you have a general policy on
oversubscription ratios you'd be able to share without going into
NDA'ed territory?
Most excellent questions. Do you have this information for other providers? I guarantee much of the rest of the community would like to know these factoids for the large backbones around the world?
Or were you just banging on Todd 'cause your first flame fizzled?
Also on-topic, I know a lot of community members have voiced RECENT
concern with the relentless tactics of your sales force, some of it
bordering on CAN-SPAM violation and criminal harassment. Could you
speak a little bit to what you're doing to bring this under control?
Would it be a problem if people mail you off-list with any specific
problems they've encountered there?
Here we agree. Todd, if you, or anyone, can fix that, we would all be appreciative. If not, it's likely the answers to Paul's previous paragraph won't matter as Bandcon will wither on the vine.
