North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: value of co-location

  • From: Paul A Vixie
  • Date: Mon Jan 22 00:55:11 1996

> ...  If you find that you prefer raw bandwidth over optical fiber
> and lots of cisco interfaces, fine, but if you like network level switching,
> shared network bandwidth and the price for that, buy switched services. 

I find that the telco-supplied fast packet service we use inside CIX goes down
several times a day and that about once every 60 hours it is necessary to call
the switch technicians and have them power down my line module (which takes
two minutes and is usually their prelude to swapping out a card) and then
powering it back up (which takes two more minutes for diagnostics) before I
can again exchange packets with anybody.

I misspoke last time I flamed about this.  There's probably very little that's
intrinsically wrong (technically speaking) with these fastpacket data services.
But the fact is, they are still so new to the telcos that they are not as
bottom-line reliable as the things telcos have been providing for much longer,
like raw bit pipes.

So for example, if my three-carrier T3 buildout won't pass bits, I can make a
four-party conference call with a pile of semi-experienced knuckle dragging
switch techs and in a few hours over a few days I can cause someone to isolate
some problem, fix it, and then we all move on to the next problem.  With the
fast packet services (SMDS and ATM, at least), when it doesn't work it takes
a hell of a lot longer to fix and sometimes it doesn't get fixed at all.

F-R, as I said earlier, seems to be the exception to this.  ATM may be on the
verge of getting better with the new generation of switches Kent spoke of.
But up 'til now it's been better for me to buy the kind of bandwidth that the
knuckledraggers down at my local telco know how to fix, and then put all the
switching intelligence into a box I can lay my own hands on.

Your mileage may vary.