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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: genuity - any good?
On Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 04:16:57PM -0700, matthew zeier wrote: > > I've gotten attractive pricing from Genuity but I haven't used them in a > couple years. Is there any reason I wouldn't want to use them as a third > upstream OC3 provider? Genuity has a slightly backwards philosophy on delivering traffic to their customers. Once upon a time they tried to sell a friend of mine an OC3, and setup a conference with one of their engineers to answer questions. In the marketing speech one of the things that was mentioned was how they kept ALL their peers at at least XX% (some low number) capacity so there was always headroom, and always immediately upgraded. So I asked them about some peers I knew at that exact moment were congested and they refused to upgrade, such as their DS3's to AboveNet (look at the Yearly graphs and you get a good idea of how things used to be): http://west-boot.mfnx.net/traffic/maee/iad-bbn.html http://west-boot.mfnx.net/traffic/chi/chi-bbn.html Their answer? "Well in that case we don't want any more capacity into them. You see they send us more traffic then we send them, which we don't want." So I asked "If I am a customer, aren't I paying for you to deliver me traffic FROM other networks as well as TO them? How do I benefit from massive congestion to a major content hosting network?". They were of course dumbfounded. So if you don't care about your traffic being potentially becoming a pawn in the Ratio Wars, Genuity will do ya just fine. My argument to them was that if they didn't feel a certain peer was up to their Ratio standards that was fine and they could seek an alternate non-congested path through someone's transit providers, but leaving congested peers up for years was unacceptable. It doesn't take all that much clue to build your own backbone so that it doesn't suck, the real test is how well you are able to reach "the internet", and that means taking care of your peers. In my mind, how quickly and proactively you can upgrade them or work around the other side's stupidities is one of the biggest indicators of the quality of your network. </rant> -- Richard A Steenbergen <[email protected]> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)
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