[BBLISA] Telecommunications Recommendations...

[David Miller]

Where I work we have a dual wan setup with a T1 and Comcast Business (16mbit
down and 2mbit up).  I monitor both links from our gateway as well as
Zenoss.  The main difference between the links are SLA.  There are many
arguments for and against SLA's I tend to think that they are pretty
worthless but they are a way out of a contract if the provider isn't living
up to their responsibilities.  So here's my experience with both links.

Now I'm in southern NH so YMMV at your location.

*Speed:  *We have consistently gotten 16+ mbit's down on Comcast and 2
mbit's up.  So on the business side they don't seem to over subscribe as
much as they do on the consumer side.

*Support:*  I haven't had to rely on either vendor for much support but
both our T1 and Business Comcast support numbers quickly get you to a real
tech support person, located in the US.  Level 1 tech support at a T1 type
provider tends to be a little more knowledgeable but the Comcast level 1
support guys are surprisingly competent and not just walking you through a
flow chart.

*Availability:* This is very slightly in favor of the T1 but it's really a
toss up as I only looked back 3 months.  But here's some numbers and my
thought on them.

Link          Availability      Number of Outages      Max Duration      Avg
T1            99.99746%                  12                        1:29
        0:17
Comcast   99.97244%                    4                      29:14
    9:02

So you're paying a lot of money to gain that last 00.025%.  Also to be fair
to Comcast here the max outage duration for Comcast was at 2:16am on 5/19.
 And there was also 5:34 outage at 2:04am.  I never called them to find out
what the cause of that outage was but I'm sure if I look back far enough
I'll see a similar outage on the T1.  Also another of those 4 outages was
due to me rebooting the Comcast router, more on that in a second.  So if we
take out those 3 data points then the Comcast line would look like this.

Comcast   99.99900%                    1                      0:19
  0:19

*Comcast Warts*:  We have had one problem with Comcast.  I think it's more
of an issue with the SMC router/cable modem that they gave us.  But every
now and then it will stop routing certain packets properly.  It's a very odd
problem that manifests itself way down stream from any Comcast network and
will only affect 1 site and the only way to get it to route properly is to
reboot the router.  It takes 1 minute for the router to reboot.  So when
someone here complains that they can't access 1 site but everything else is
working I bounce the router to solve the problem.

During the ice storm a while back we lost power to our building for 1 week.
 Luckily we were running our servers and routers on a generator.  But our
Comcast link was down for a week while our T1 was up and running the entire
time surprisingly.

--
David

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Richard 'Doc' Kinne <rkinne at aavso.org>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)
>
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>
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