UU Net sales tactics?

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

Has anyone else received a phone call from a UUnet salesman out of the blue?
It appears that he used the Boardwatch magazine, because he quoted me some
information out of it about my company.

I simply can not believe the egos they have. I will never do business with
UUnet, with this or any other company I am with. I use Fiber Network
Solutions currently and am very happy with the service. Todd and Kyle are
excellent at what they do.

The comments that peaked my anger the most were.
"Im sure companies as small as yours would b content with someone as small
as Fibernet"

When I stated to them that their company is one of the most expensive T1
providers, he responded with
"Not every company is able to afford the best Internet that can be offered"
(implying UUnet is directly that).

Any comments or stories that can be shared?

2

The implication might have been true (or at least fairly true) 3-4 years
ago. I can definitely say from personal experience as a former customer,
the quality of their service degraded considerably, the clue level at
their NOC went down considerably, and they basically just aren't the
company they once were. I can give people specific stories to back all
this up...but don't want to waste everyone's time with them here.

3

Yes. They cold call me at least once a month.

Until they close their smurf amplifiers, theyre not even a consideration.

-Dan

4

I thought it was TRULY impressive that they cold-called me, even though the
company I worked for HAD service from them. :slight_smile:

Funny thing was he didn't believe me. Then he was really annoyed when I
indicated that it was entirely possible we wouldn't be staying with them
since that was a development location and there were a lot cheaper places
to get better service.

Of course, management had no immediate plans, but everything is a
statistical probability.

Cold-callers annoy me. That's enough reason to rule them out for service in
my not-so-humble opinion. :slight_smile:

D

5

No one wants to EVEN hear my horror stories about trying to use US West
for bandwidth in New Mexico.

1) Dedicated T1 - Takes >1000ms to get to most sites on the internet, and
this has been going on for 7 months. The best i've seen it, is about
200ms.

2) High packet loss.

3) Bad support, no response

4) Refusal to help trace smurf attacks. Responding with 'we dont do that'
'there's nothing that can be done' etc.

1 gw.netmdc.com (207.108.254.129) 1.802 ms 1.701 ms 1.719 ms
2 207.108.242.29 (207.108.242.29) 30.15 ms 20.047 ms 19.33 ms
3 207.108.240.219 (207.108.240.219) 20.304 ms 207.108.240.251
(207.108.240.251) 21.863 ms 35.917 ms
4 206.181.23.45 (206.181.23.45) 898.806 ms 871.499 ms *
5 * dfw2-core1-pt4-0-0.atlas.digex.net (165.117.52.54) 1016.41 ms 1025
ms
6 dfw2-core2-fa9-1-0.atlas.digex.net (165.117.52.102) 1082.72 ms
874.674 ms 726.922 ms
7 lax1-core1-pt8-0-0.atlas.digex.net (165.117.50.25) 890.003 ms
960.496 ms 929.894 ms
8 sjc4-core2-pt5-0-0.atlas.digex.net (165.117.53.74) 968.47 ms 1143.35
ms 1020.44 ms
9 sjc4-core1-fa5-1-0.atlas.digex.net (165.117.244.1) 998.47 ms 1034.6

AND this is from a company that doesnt even carry their own transit. They
are just reselling other providers. From talking to the techs at their
center, they are pushing all new mexico traffic through the albuquerque
pop, which runs 5 T1's. 4 through digex, and 1 through uu.

Has anyone else received a phone call from a UUnet salesman out of the blue?
It appears that he used the Boardwatch magazine, because he quoted me some
information out of it about my company.

I simply can not believe the egos they have. I will never do business with
UUnet, with this or any other company I am with. I use Fiber Network
Solutions currently and am very happy with the service. Todd and Kyle are
excellent at what they do.

The comments that peaked my anger the most were.
"Im sure companies as small as yours would b content with someone as small
as Fibernet"

When I stated to them that their company is one of the most expensive T1
providers, he responded with
"Not every company is able to afford the best Internet that can be offered"
(implying UUnet is directly that).

Any comments or stories that can be shared?

  _ __ _____ __ _________
______________ /_______ ___ ____ /______ John Gonzalez/Net.Engineer
__ __ \ __ \ __/_ __ `__ \/ __ /_ ___/ MDC Computers/netMDC!
_ / / / `__/ /_ / / / / / / /_/ / / /__ (505)437-7600/fax-437-3052
/_/ /_/\___/\__/ /_/ /_/ /_/\__,_/ \___/ http://www.netmdc.com
[---------------------------------------------[system info]-----------]
11:55am up 17 days, 15:24, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00

6

Has anyone else received a phone call from a UUnet salesman out of the blue?
It appears that he used the Boardwatch magazine, because he quoted me some
information out of it about my company.

heh. That sounds like UUNet. When I was at OneWorld, I used to get calls
from WC trying to get us to change our LD carrier to them. We told them
"uhh. hell no" :slight_smile: Little did they know that we were dropping UUNet like a
rock too :slight_smile:

[stuff cut]

The comments that peaked my anger the most were.
"Im sure companies as small as yours would b content with someone as small
as Fibernet"

hrm. Who was your sales person? You should talk to his boss and ream him
for sales person's manners.

When I stated to them that their company is one of the most expensive T1
providers, he responded with
"Not every company is able to afford the best Internet that can be offered"
(implying UUnet is directly that).

heh. I had both our sales rep and the technical leads on the phone after
we had escalated what I considered a minor problem.

When I was at OneWorld, we were using 8 /24's that we weren't supposed to.
Some belonged to Global Center (who OWS, previously GlobalVillage owned)
and some to other providers. UUNet was happily redistributing our BGP
announcements for these /24's through their network. This is, of course, a
Bad Thing(tm). So, I contacted UUNet and told them "We are currently using
8 Class C's we are not allowed to be using." and requested "5 Class C's to
completely replace the IP allocation" that we had. Within a day I got a
reply from them rejecting our request because OWS wasn't using at least
90% of the current allocation.

I personally thought UUNet was on crack. I replied "what are you talking
about? We're trying to replace what we have now completely". In the
original email I had even sent them the IPs we weren't supposed to use so
they knew what we had.

Two weeks later, we discovered what happened. It seems that according to
UUNet records, we already had a /21 allocated to us. However, their
idiotic tech couldn't graps the fact that we were "One World" and the
account said "One World" but the allocation information on the /21 said
Primenet even though it was attached to our account. I had a field day
over this. As it is I ended up purchasing a T1 from Best Internet to
replace the UUNet line and told UUNet the reasons for the termination.

Mel

Melody Lynn Yoon melodyy+KF6RMW@best.com | Graduate - '97 MSF
Consultant - Collective Technologies | NRA Member
- I do not accept commercial, unsolicited email | kf6rmw@w6yx.#nca.ca.usa.noam
- http://www.best.com/~melodyy/spam.policy.html | KF6RMW - Amateur Radio

7

---Reply on mail from John Golovich about UU Net sales tactics?

Has anyone else received a phone call from a UUnet salesman out of the blue?
It appears that he used the Boardwatch magazine, because he quoted me some
information out of it about my company.

Yup, and he was VERY demanding in his statements about how they have the
*BEST* network compared to anyone else, and how they offer better service,
and the price difference isnt an issue :slight_smile:

I simply can not believe the egos they have. I will never do business with
UUnet, with this or any other company I am with. I use Fiber Network
Solutions currently and am very happy with the service. Todd and Kyle are
excellent at what they do.

We arent a network provider so how they got our name (other than via
internic/arin perhaps ...) is a bit of a mystery (ie we wouldnt have been
in boardwatch for any reason)

The comments that peaked my anger the most were.
"Im sure companies as small as yours would b content with someone as small
as Fibernet"

When I stated to them that their company is one of the most expensive T1
providers, he responded with
"Not every company is able to afford the best Internet that can be offered"
(implying UUnet is directly that).

He told me that I had my facts wrong, and that he would send me some
information to 'show me the light' or whatever, I told him not to, and
they did anyway..

the UUNET rep got a bit upset when I askedl em why a T3 is like 48,000 and a
OC3 is 178,000 (more than 3x, which means no 'bulk discount' etc)
He also gets upset when you mention OC48 and how other people have made
public statements of their intention to upgrade to that (sprint, bbn, psi
all have) and they havent made any such statement (at least not as
publicly)..

8

Actually, I called UUNet today, and the sales guy was actually pretty cool.
Specifically said that UUNet would probably be out of the price range we
were considering, and that I could probably get a better deal somewhere else.

On top of that, he still gave me the information that I called to get in
the first place.

They are a little pushy about the "We are the best" thing, though.

9

Actually, we have been pretty happy with UUNet. The technical people seem
quite competent and their network is reliable and adequately provisioned.
Of course, YMMV.

Personally, I think most salespeople are worthless. What I want out of
a salesperson is an order taker and someone to send me information I
request. I don't want high pressure sales or making up facts. Our own
salespeople do this and it annoys me to no end, and I am sure that some
of our potential customers feel the same way and go elsewhere. I have been
known to go out of my way to avoid buying from a pushy salesperson, but
in general I don't hold it against the company if they have a decent product.

John Tamplin Traveller Information Services
jat@Traveller.COM 2104 West Ferry Way
256/705-7007 - FAX 256/705-7100 Huntsville, AL 35801

10

Funny you should mention this. I have a 45MB/s feed to UUNet in Dallas,
and have had for years. Probably a year ago I had a UUNet salesman call me
out of the blue saying he was now responsible for my account, and I should
be talking to him for all of my UUNet related business. However,
according to WorldCom, and more specifically my WorldCom sales rep, I was
still supposed to go through WorldCom for my UUNet dealings. Can you say
comi$$ion?

About two months back, I got a flyer from UUNet, with a new person
claiming to be my sales rep. Again, the WorldCom rep I have states she
should be our primary contact for UUNet business.

Personally, I think the UUNet feed I have is excellent, but it would be
nice to see a bit more UUNet-WorldCom coordination. It's leaving those of
us in the customer community confused.

Louis

11

The UUnet rep who called me was also insistent that UUnet had the best
technical support in the industry. I indicated to him that I had dealt
with UUnet tech support in the past and was _not_ impressed[1], and was
met with about 30 seconds of stunned silence. B)

-Dan

[1] The industry as a whole seems to have horrible tech support though.
    Without exception, _every single NOC I have dealt with_ has been
    _pathetic_. Especially on critical issues like denial of service
    attacks.

12

Great! But the thread's about UUNet. :stuck_out_tongue:

13

Last month they were selling full DS3 for 25k/month. Beat'em up.

14

In the immortal words of John Golovich (john@ciag.net):

Has anyone else received a phone call from a UUnet salesman out of the blue?

"Yes, Frequently."

The comments that peaked my anger the most were.
"Im sure companies as small as yours would b content with someone as small
as Fibernet"

If a salesperson cold-calling you has the poor sense to be rude or insulting,
there are two effective tactics:

1. Hang up.

2. Ask to speak to their manager.

-n

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