[BBLISA] Telecommunications Recommendations...

[K. M. Peterson]

Doc,

First, I think you're talking about "symmetric" rather than synchronous, no?  That's different "speeds" in and out.

It's surprising how this stuff is costed out.  You've looked at Comcast Business, which is priced in competition with ADSL and consumer offerings - it looks pretty inexpensive, naturally.

As Steve pointed out, one of the principal questions is what the SLA says.  I'd go a bit further, and suggest that an asymmetric service is simply best for "consumers" (of data) rather than servers; you mentioned that Comcast offers static IPs for their Business Class service which is good, but if you really want to optimize things you should probably consider outsourcing any critical services such as Mail (I see you're using Gmail - for example); and low-cost hosting or Virtual Private Servers or Amazon Web Services, etc.  

What you're paying for with a DS1 is that your vendor considers it an emergency when there's an outage.  Comcast - I suspect even the Business service - won't be necessarily be provide that same response.  The inability for people at your location to access the Internet may or may not be more of a problem than the ability of people/services on the Internet being able to access your location.  If you break these apart, an outage on your local loop is much easier to evaluate, and the costs more understandable.

In fact, you might want to consider two connections, from different providers (and physically routed differently, if that's possible) given the cost savings.  Again, not all that complicated to set up - as long as you're not trying to route external traffic to your location.  Otherwise, all bets are off (ask Comcast if they'll advertise your BGP routes and see!).

Other options you might consider: fixed-wireless (I've spoken to Pipeline Wireless), Verizon DSL and/or a reseller like SpeakEasy.  

Hope this helps,
_KMP

On 12Jul10, at 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?
> ----
> Doc Kinne, AAVSO
> (From the Gmail Web Interface)
> 
> _______________________________________________
> bblisa mailing list
> bblisa at bblisa.org
> http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa