[46833] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: genuity - any good?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard A Steenbergen)
Fri Apr 12 12:31:05 2002
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 12:16:45 -0400
From: Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net>
To: matthew zeier <matthew@velvet.org>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Message-ID: <20020412161645.GG523@overlord.e-gerbil.net>
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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 <ras@e-gerbil.net> 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)
