DS3 Ordering Experiences

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1

How's Level3? Anyone else have any good/bad experiences with them?

Best,

joe

From: "Martin Hannigan" <hannigan@fugawi.net>
To: <nanog@merit.edu>
Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 3:21 PM
Subject: Re: DS3 Ordering Experiences

>
>
>
> >This might help some people ordering DS3s from UUnet in the future, so
> >I'll post it here for the archives.
> >
> >We ordered a DS3 to UUnet last July, and after several blown FOC dates,
we
> >finally started passing packets last night. (And man, nothing like 2 ms
> >latency and being able to measure downloads in MB/s.) Thank god the
> >circuit is quality, or this would be an entirely different post.
> >
> >UUnet was amazingly slow: 7+ months to terminate a DS3 to Frederick,

MD,

> >50 miles north of their world headquarters.
>
>
> [ snip ]
>
>
> Remember that post I made a bit back that was supposed to be a personal
> note regarding
> an OC12?
>
> I have my OC12 with an FOC of March 15, 10 days ahead of my six weeks. I
> also have a lot of confidence in the ability to deliver it on time.
>
> It took me awhile, but the part about being the squeaky wheel is very

true

2

L3 is the ghetto of colos. Or maybe I just had a bad time with them.

The line:
A T1 from Sunnyvale to San Francisco took them 3 months to hammer
out. Not that long, but then it's just a T1. And why they didn't string
it from their their SF site is beyond me... I was working the Unix end of
that install, which was bad enough.

The cross-connect:
Three weeks to string 60 feet of cat5. Not good.

The cage:
Three weeks per phone line, they said. (The customer had three modems, so
needed 3 POTS lines.) And, they run serially, not in parallel. So, I
waited 9 weeks for an afternoon's work. This, after waiting a month for
them to build the cage itself.

The Colo:
Dusty. Like, really, really dusty. And warm. Computers do not care too
much for dust in their works, nor for 80-degree weather. Ah, and the
telco closet, where my 9-weeks-in-the-making POTS lines were terminated
was an unlocked closet right off the main entrance to the machine
room. It veritably defined spaghetti, and there was water (!!) on the
floor. Like, big puddle, not just mop leavings.

And, an associate's FTP servers were down for three days, following a
botched MPLS implementation... But that's his story, not mine.

In Level3's defense, their IP services are relatively decent, and they're
probably the cheapest colo/ISP/whatnot that you're likely to
find. Andonce stuff's installed, it doesn't seem to go down very
often. And I'veonly dealt with Level3 in three projects, all at the same
colo in the same time, so maybe my problems were an isolated incident. I
do know that I won't be giving them any of my business for a while.

Matthew Devney

3

I can't speak to the condition of the colo space. However, I do know
that there was never any botched MPLS implementation in the Bay area that
would have resulted in servers in the colo space losing connectivity for
three days. Someone must've mis-informed your associate.
Unfortunately sometimes inaccurate information can come directly from
a mis-spoken customer support rep or NOC tech when customers are looking
for an explanation to an outage and that doesn't do anybody any good.

Just my .02 in since information like that tends to get around via word of
mouth and I think everyone appreciates when the information is accurate.

regards
-cp

* Thus spake mdevney@teamsphere.com (mdevney@teamsphere.com):

[snip]