I am currently in the process of evaluating carriers for future expansion into international regions, primarily Asia, Europe and South America.
I am comfortable with AT&T and Verizon however I would like to make sure I include all the major players and would like your direct feedback and commentary in regards to any of them.
These are the key areas I am concerned with.
Support
Reliability
Flexibility
Complexity
Coverage
I am looking at two deployment options as well if anyone would like to comment.
A single carrier for global connectivity to all sites (mpls etc)
A single carrier for global regional connectivity, and in country/regional carriers for all local offices that funnel back to regional aggregation points.
Will you be running any multicast applications on these links? Are they real-time video or data feeds? If so I’d steer clear of any MPLS based solutions and stick with something that gives you a deterministic path.
Personally I’d stay away from Radianz and YIPES as I’ve had bad experiences with them over the past year. They have a significant amount of outages and most go unexplained.
I have a global network with Global Crossing now and they average about 2-3 small outages (less than 5 minutes) per week but their NOC engineers seem to be helpful and respond quickly with RFOs. Proper backup paths prevent it causing much of an issue.
Is multihoming and/or traffic engineering over multiple connections a
requirement? Should it be, or is "multiple links to one sufficiently big
upstream AS" good enough?