[BBLISA] Telecommunications Recommendations...

[stephen wadlow]

On Mon, July 12, 2010 12:20, Richard 'Doc' Kinne wrote:
> Good Morning, Folks:
>
> I'm in the midst of taking a look at re-doing our internet service. We
> currently have a sychronous DS1 line (1.5Mbps in and out) which, being
> the non-profit we are, has been all we've been able to afford based on
> what we have. This DS1 line, with 24 routable internet addresses costs
> us about $600 month. If I go to a 36 month contract I can get it down
> to $450 or so.
>
> However, we're now in a position where we need a much larger download
> pipe than an upload pipe, so I started taking a look at asynchronous
> solutions. Taking a look at Comcast they were able to offer me 20Mbps
> down and 2Mbps up and 13 (down from 24) IP addresses for about
> $95/month.
>
> Now even if that 20Mbps down actually turns out to be, say, 5Mbps down
> there is still a night and day difference in the cost. It is such a
> large difference that I'm trying to figure out what I am fundamentally
> missing. Based on what I know know I can't think I could make any
> other recommendation to my Director. And I can't think how any other
> service, including the one I have now, remains competitive.
>
> I feel I'm missing something fundamental here. What are the
> experiences anyone on the list have had?

It's a tossup.   You won't get the reliability (or SLA) with Comcast
Business that you'll get with a T1, and I'm not sure I'd want to have
email being delivered over it (since  you might find that your address
block is rejected by lots of other mail servers out there, but it is a
hell of a lot cheaper than a T1.    That said, you haven't actually said
what services you're using the T1 for.

I'd suggest getting the comcast business pack, but if you're doing
anything where you need to maintain an SLA or any sort of service
reliability, then consider having something hosted in a datacenter.

I would also ask Comcast Business how much bandwidth they can guarantee,
what their SLA is, and what their uptime performance numbers are, as well
as their mean time to problem resolution.    I doubt Comcast consumer
could answer any of those, but Comcast Business should have some clue.

As for other options.... there aren't any that are cost effective,
especially in this part of the country.    The last mile is still way too
expensive, while actual bandwidth is comparatively cheap.   For a lot of
uses this means that hosting in a datacenter, and putting all your
reliability there, while having lower grade bandwidth (ie:  cable modems)
for the bandwidth to the user ends up being a lot cheaper than getting
higher cost data lines direct to the end user.

                 -steve