Do y’all like HE for Internet uplink? I’m thinking about using them for 100gig in Texas. It would be for my eyeballs ISP. We currently have Spectrum, Telia and Cogent.
-Aaron
You would get better peering from Equinix IX, which includes free HE IPv4 Peering + IPv6 Transit
Ryan
sounds like he needs full routes…
They're a good bulk/budget option in a blend. A decent number of content hosts are keen to source traffic into them. I would be loathe to be single-homed to them, but even then they're not the worst option in that department.
If you've already got Telia, Spectrum, and Cogent, 6939 is probably a great addition to your blend.
They'll probably want a 5yr contract out of you to get their best (and headline per-Mbps) rate. Evaluate carefully what position that puts you in based on the continually dropping cost of wholesale transit and bulk interconnect opportunities. You may prefer a shorter contract term at slightly higher rates.
As others said, if you don't need full routes from them, they have a VERY open peering policy, and that 100G port might be better suited to a local IX where you can pick them up along with a bunch of other content networks.
In Minnesota, hurricane has the lowest latency and most routes out of our state. I can reach most destinations with lower latency than any other carrier I’ve tested.
Their NOC is great and easy to reach. Billing is perfect and predictable with no hidden fees or surcharges in the fine print. And their pricing is some of the best out there.
They peer with anyone who wants to peer and they’re on more IX’s than any other provider.
You would do well to add them to your mix and remove one of the other ones. I’d probably remove spectrum and replace with HE. We’ve only had 30 minutes of downtime total in 5 years so they’ve been very reliable for us.
I removed Spectrum (Charter) and replaced them with HE. The latter's value proposition was far superior, plus HE is friendlier to work with, and easier to get in touch with a clued individual at HE.
You don’t appear to be on any IXes. Definitely join some IXes before buying another 100G of transit.
DFW has a couple and there are some more that are starting up.
Yep. Get on some IXes first. You’d be able to offload a ton of traffic to free peering, vs sending everything via the transit you pay for.
Side note, they don’t support any traffic engineer aside from prepends but no complaints Besides that.
I have to be in Dallas for that right?
I’m in Austin (Data Foundry) and San Antonio (100 Taylor)
-Aaron
Don’t you have to be there to join?
I’m in Austin and San Antonio
-Aaron
Generally one would order a circuit (aka wave) between your location and the IX fabric at the interchange if you’re not at the site you’re wanting to peer at.
For instance, the network I am the network engineer for has a circuit which terminates into the Seattle IX (SIX) fabric. We don’t have any other presence in Seattle (or Washington for that matter) at this point - our circuit connects directly to our port on the Exchange. We’re considering adding a similar link to another exchange point somewhere to the east or southeast of us. I haven’t looked at the graphs recently, but it’s not uncommon for >50% of our traffic to come from the exchange. And yes, we’re peered with Hurricane and others there.
We’re also looking at dropping 1U or so of equipment in so we can pick up some transit as well, but that’s a story for a different day about the joys of providing internet in the less populated parts of the country.
In your case, it also looks like there are also some peering options at the datacenters you are currently at as well. You may want to do some more research to determine how that might work in your situation. PeeringDB is a good resource along with google searches for “peering 100 Taylor” or “peering austin data foundry”
For small ISPs looking at setting up their first ever presence at an IX point, you almost certainly would not be ordering an actual ‘wave’ (eg: a specific DWDM channel on a legacy 10G DWDM platform, handed off to you with 1310/LX interfaces at both ends), but lit layer 2 transport service between the carrier hotel and your service location.
Pricing for the two types of service can be quite different when you request an actual ‘wave’ from a carrier sales person, vs just lit L2 transport capable of large MTUs, QinQ, etc.
The ISP carrying it might take it between those two places as simply a vlan trunked through a larger 100G link, as a MPLS circuit, lots of possible things.
Unless you happened to be in a happy conjunction of the right place at the right time, and an older DWDM system on exactly the same path you wanted happened to have an empty channel and ready to go interface cards at both ends.
I guess I should have been a bit clearer.
Yes, what you would be ordering is typically a lit L2 circuit. However, my experience is that certain carrier salespeople tend to call anything like this a ‘wave’. I have had lots of discussions over the years with various salespeople about the difference, and yes, it’s pretty much always lit L2. Centurylink (now Lumen) even sells a service they call “Encrypted Wavelength Service”. Not sure how one encrypts light…
To go any distance of significance you don’t do pure light, pumping the light increases signal but it increases noise too, eventually you have to regen the signal. Most of these active services are frame aware from first hop to last hop and encryption is on the cards without being in any meaningful way different to your unencrypted wave.
This is done typically even in short distances, as the signal you give them, is not the signal they want to put in their network, so they’ll use a transponder to change it to something more applicable.
Passive optical mux is not the common case. But it indeed would not give opportunity for encryption in technology what we have today (but I do not understand enough to say it would be fundamentally impossible).
Good ISP, fast and knowledgeable NOC, pricing is also pretty good.
If you have multiple peers already and want to do traffic management/engineering forget it. HE heavily peers with everyone and they don't accept communities from their clients.
We had horrible experiences with them a long time ago. Inexplicable packet loss problems, route weirdness, so we dumped them.
A couple of years ago we decided to give them another try (I was skeptical), but so far it has been just fine.
Depending on transport costs, it may be cheaper to just use HE at a datacenter he’s already in vs going to a datacenter he’s not in currently.
HE has 10G of transit for as low as $900 right now. If 10G of transport from him to an IX is more than that, there’s no financial incentive to peer instead of buy more transit. Since HE peers with everyone on most IX’s, he is essentially paying HE for full routes plus peering to the same IX he would go to anyway. It’s lower cost and you kill two birds with one stone. I understand the desire to have your own connection to an IX but having HE in the mix is basically like peering direct since they’re everywhere in nearly every IX. The other upside is you don’t need to waste time trying to establish bilateral peering sessions with providers who don’t peer with the route servers.
Indeed -- I've found the HE folk amongst the friendliest and most
responsive set of people to work with. If "I'd like to be able to
reach someone and have them actually try and help" is in your decision
process, HE does really well.
This is an incredibly important thing, especially when you are having
a bad day, and it's 3AM and 2 things are already on fire...
W
Charter/Spectrum calls it an EPL - Ethernet Private Line.