Hi,
We're currently looking to buy transit from XO for one of our DCs.
Their pricing is very competative compared to some of the other
providers we've considered to date.
I'm hoping to get some feedback on their services, support, peering
arrangements and the overall stability of their core backbone network
from folks who've had experience or currently using them.
Any info would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance
I can't say I share the same experience. Their pricing is mediocre and
their billing and customer service are absolutely atrocious. They sold
me six cabinets with transit in one of their facilities, never
installed power to the cabinets, and then tried to invoice me for the
transit. To this day no one at XO sees fit to fix this injustice so
they're to the impression that I owe them for the balance of a
contract that was literally unusable.
Jeff
XO has many downs than ups. I am a current XO customer mainly due to the costs, having voice, PtP, Transit, and Co-Location.
Here is my rundown.
Internet Transit: Yes it works, and when their routing goes ape, no one knows what is going on. They have a tendency not to do a "wr mem" on their ciscos.
Point to Point: Yes it works, but when they have to take an OC12 or some large circuit down you might be notified the day of. Also if you have more than one circuit with them, finding what circuit will be hit takes ages on their side.
Co-Location: One crap shoot close to death. A "change control" group has to approve changes, adds, and you as a customer has zero say.
Call Center: I feel like Mr. Bean is running the call center. Depending on who you call, and when they last did trainning you will get a wild range of responces. Even for the simplest of things takes about 20 min to make a ticket, and some have taken past 40min.
Voice: Random failures of not being able to reach cell phone carriers. Random issues where some trunk lines just go offline. But to XO it is always the customer hardware. Another great feature if you have a trouble ticket and in part of correcting the issue if some other change was introduced an automated system will back out any changes weeks later.
It is one of those things in life you deal with because the tradeoff is something execs see as the monthly OPEX costs.
Stefan
Thanks for the detailed feedback stefan. Its very much appreciated.
I'd also like to say thanks for all the private replies. This will
certainly go a long way in helping us decide who we end up going with.
Best,
Thanks for reaching out Brian. We'll certainly keep Saavis in mind and
advise as deemed fit.
Regards,
Here in the New York Metro, XO's collocation offering is pretty solid.
No frills, but competently managed, and offered under a reasonable
pricing model for retail collocation.
I've had similarly positive experiences with their transport side of
the house. I've not looked at the IP product...
I certainly belive the negative XO feedback shared; having heard
similar, it would seem there's definite potential to be treated as
merely a number. At the same time, our experience has been great, and
I'd happily recommend them. I think the quality of your XO customer
experience is directly proportional to the caliber of your account
team, along with your ability to vendor-manage and assemble a suitable
escalation matrix.
As for the Savvis suggestion, I'm not sure I'd agree. We're in 2010,
yet they continue to maintain a fair number of gigabit-sized peering
interfaces, seemingly operating at or close to capacity.
HTH,
-a
In the DC Market I can provide this input:
Voice PRIs - Apparently they don't realize they can provide CNAM service and
will argue that CallerID Name is not available from XO at all.
Voice SIP - They had a major DID outage this year for 8 to 12 hours that was
nationwide.
Point to Point DS3 - 3 or 4 complete failures in the past year. They then
failed to work with the local ILEC to arrange a time to meet and test
equipment. If I buy a circuit from XO, I don't expect to have to call Qwest
and Verizon to organize engineers. I'm paying XO to do that for me. Each
outage was on average 3 days long.
In the Las Vegas Market:
Flex T1 - Internet latency was extremely high. However they did install the
circuit in 2 weeks.
Usually the pricing is very good and this makes it hard to weigh all the
cons.
~Jared
How many co-lo centers do they operate and where are they ? - Curiosity
on my part.
Todd
Thanks for the feedback Jared.
We are in their datacenter in Fremont, CA, which is an old Concentric
datacenter. A while back they moved the management of that under their
telco-colo management. Only more problems since then. 3-phase power?
Only because we are grand fathered in. Their telco-colos are very
cookie cutter and the Fremont Datacenter does not fit into this mold.
Here is a page that will point you to all their locations
http://www.xo.com/services/network/Pages/collocation.aspx