I've gotten attractive pricing from Genuity but I haven't used them in a
couple years. Is there any reason I wouldn't want to use them as a third
upstream OC3 provider?
Thanks.
- mz
My company has been utilizing multiple DS3 facilities from Genuity for several years with few complaints. Until recently we had almost 100% uptime (minus the outage following the WTC attack) and their NOC/Engineering staff are top notch and very responsive. I would feel comfortable using them as a secondary provider, and wouldn't hesitate for a moment to recommend them as a tertiary transit provider.
Regards,
Anthony
matthew@velvet.org wrote:
I love Genuity's latest set of commercials. Who doesn't have a "legacy"
in their network? Much better than Black Rocket (anything would have been
better).
For Internet stuff they are very good. Genuity is a bi-coastal provider,
lots of business on the east and west coast, only a little in the middle
of the country. They don't have as high a brand recognition as some other
providers, and they don't have a multi-product (long-distance, cell
phones, etc) sales force. Genuity is one of a few providers I would
recommend as a primary ISP. As a tertiary provider, they might be a
bit pricey in comparison to some of the other bit-mover providers. But
when you need NOC support, they are top-notch.
I've gotten attractive pricing from Genuity but I haven't used them
in a couple years. Is there any reason I wouldn't want to use them
as a third upstream OC3 provider?
I think they are outstanding. After using a bunch-o'nsps from 1994 to
1998, including 5 at a time, we picked Genuity when we went to the DS3
level because they consistently had the best cross-country RTT, the
fewest issues, the best trouble ticket system, and friendly and
capable people who interact well with us both by phone and email.
Still no complaints after all this time.
I was concerned when the BBN->GTEI->Genuity (+ nap.net?)
transitions happened, but I saw no degradation of operations.
I've only had one billing glitch in all this time.
Compared to other telco-based NSPs, this is very refreshing
(and time saving).
-mark
>> I've gotten attractive pricing from Genuity but I haven't used them
>> in a couple years.Is there any reason I wouldn't want to use them
>> as a third upstream OC3 provider?
Been using them since 1999 when we (AS378) bought transit at AADS via
Nap.net->GTEI->BBN->Genuity.
Over the course of 3 years we have had only two major problems with them:
- August 1999: multiple install problems, from providing us incorrect
passwords, improper in-addr.arpa records for the link, wrong vpi/vci
assignment, etc.
-November 2000: we lost ATM connectivity to BBN (Ameritech did an ATM
switch upgrade) and the BBN NOC Superviser was non-cooperative and
close to abusive. Escalation worked and we got mugs and BBN T-shirts for
all our NOC staff out of it 
Since then, not a single complaint. Their NOC today is very good. They
also provide secondary for all our NS stuff. Every time there is some
serial problem or other DNS problem, they spot it immediately and send us
an email to alert us to the problem.
Their sales staff is also clueful for a change.
For an ISP in the top 10 as per CAIDA, I'd give them an A-.
Hank
Two bad experiences for me:
1) Their BGP polices are not as good as others. They force you to register
each route you want to advertise rather than allowing you to advertise any
reasonable route for your prefixes. According to one of their top people,
prefix-lists were unreliable new technology. We gave up and canceled the
circuit.
2) Try to quit is a nightmare. We were billed for months beyond our
cancellation.
Roy Engehausen
matthew zeier wrote:
The company I work for has an OC-3 from them and it provides pretty good
transit. Every time we've had to deal with their NOC guys (which is not
very often) they've been really good about handling whatever issue we may
have.
Off the top of my head, I can't recall the last time we had an outage on
their circut due to an issue on their end.
-Eric
Genuity has a slightly backwards philosophy on delivering traffic to their
customers.
Once upon a time they tried to sell a friend of mine an OC3, and setup a
conference with one of their engineers to answer questions. In the
marketing speech one of the things that was mentioned was how they kept
ALL their peers at at least XX% (some low number) capacity so there was
always headroom, and always immediately upgraded. So I asked them about
some peers I knew at that exact moment were congested and they refused to
upgrade, such as their DS3's to AboveNet (look at the Yearly graphs and
you get a good idea of how things used to be):
http://west-boot.mfnx.net/traffic/maee/iad-bbn.html
http://west-boot.mfnx.net/traffic/chi/chi-bbn.html
Their answer? "Well in that case we don't want any more capacity into
them. You see they send us more traffic then we send them, which we don't
want." So I asked "If I am a customer, aren't I paying for you to deliver
me traffic FROM other networks as well as TO them? How do I benefit from
massive congestion to a major content hosting network?". They were of
course dumbfounded.
So if you don't care about your traffic being potentially becoming a pawn
in the Ratio Wars, Genuity will do ya just fine. My argument to them was
that if they didn't feel a certain peer was up to their Ratio standards
that was fine and they could seek an alternate non-congested path through
someone's transit providers, but leaving congested peers up for years was
unacceptable.
It doesn't take all that much clue to build your own backbone so that it
doesn't suck, the real test is how well you are able to reach "the
internet", and that means taking care of your peers. In my mind, how
quickly and proactively you can upgrade them or work around the other
side's stupidities is one of the biggest indicators of the quality of your
network.
</rant>
we experienced problems, their NOC opened a ticket, had someone with
clue and enable looking at it, notified the customer (me), and had
testers from the LEC and WCOM on the horn -- all over the course of ~
5-10 minutes. And this was 'after hours', mind you...
Pricing is a bit on the high side compared to other providers in their
league, at least when I've had things quoted out recently. If you're
looking for quality over quantity, I'd have no qualms recommending
them.
-a
Pricing is a bit on the high side compared to other providers in their
league, at least when I've had things quoted out recently. If you're
looking for quality over quantity, I'd have no qualms recommending
them.
I found that quite the opposite. I was amazed that they matched my Internap
pricing. I expected to see something around Sprint or UUNET or AT&T.
- mz
One of our upstreams wanted this so we just ended up sending them every
legit network/prefix combo for our main networks (2 * /17) . They end up
with over 500 entries in their database and any one time we are only
advertising about 20 of them.