What is it with these guys? Their first line responders are always arrogant, inexperienced, and complacent as all hell. Every single time I’m experiencing latency or packet drops and I’ve narrowed the problem down to their circuit, I always dread making that call, because I know what I’m going to get. “Ain’t no problem here, boss! You’d better check your 'quipment.” After escalating the ticket several times (usually finding its way to a director level), a solution is always found – usually weeks from the initial contact. How frustrating is that?
I’ve dealt with Time Warner’s NOC a lot, and they’re pretty good. The Verizon Business and Internap NOCs have been marginally effective – they’re NOCs after all, can’t expect service with a smile. But, the Savvis NOC is just dreadful. They do one or two quick checks (that usually don’t prove anything if they’re even related to the issue I’m having) and quickly shoot back a note that everything’s fine on their end and that they’re closing the case. Are you shitting me? They make outlandish claims (e.g., those ping times you see are a bug in Cisco’s IOS; it’s a cosmetic issue), and all requests for Cisco-endorsed documentation to back up this assertion are ignored. Why? Because they’re making it up to cover their shitty tier-4 backbone.
We pay $9,000 a month for this OC-3 we have with them and the contract is up in 2 months. At a time when we should be acquiring more bandwidth form them, we’re going to terminate the relationship. We just can’t work with them anymore. Tonight was the final straw.
I know and it’s frustrating to no end. I’ve asked them for documentation or something from Cisco that says, “Yep, it’s a bug and we’re working with Savvis to resolve it.” Instead they give me the Savvis master case number they have open with Cisco – which of course contains information to which I’m not privileged.
The second escalation just happened. You’d think their directors would get sick of doing a tier 2’s job by now.
While I’m ok with Saavis in general, paying $9k for a OC3 should be worth your headaches. We pay $20k for a pipe to our data center in Reston, VA with little management on it.
Oh, those guys. My husband still gets the occasional late night call from them from the job he left two years ago, no matter how many times we tell them to update their contacts.
Imagine that your cable TV goes out frequently, but when you call the cable provider they always tell you nothing’s wrong, and it must be your TV or the batteries in your remote. Or that HBO has been broadcasting a lot of “dark pixels” lately, which may cause your screen to appear black.
Are you serious? We pay $6k for a Level3 OC3, and more than 1/4th of that is the AT&T local loop. Our Qwest OC3s are even less. I just negotiated to upgrade the L3 OC3 to a 300M gigE (effectively doubling the capacity) for only about $250/MRC more.
And we’re not even talking major MSAs here. They’re dirt cheap in Chicago, NY, etc.
I think you guys are getting steals for your pipes. I’m going to tell my PMs (perhaps they’re pocketing the difference :dubious: ). The pipe I was talking about earlier runs from White Plains, NY to Reston, VA. I’m not sure exactly what traffic is on it, but I do know that there are some HR apps, a virtual environment, dedicated servers, a SAN of some sort, mirroring for all that, and of course disaster recovery. But, like I said, just the pipe was $20k, minimal monitoring. Maybe we had them dig it themselves? I don’t know…
gigE Ethernet is seriously driving down optical/sonet pricing.
It also heavily depends on the volume discounts and wholesale relationships you have with these carriers. To clarify, those pipes I mentioned are DIA (dedicated internet access, or dedicated IP, and NAP- network access points, choose your term). I work for a telecom consortium that, among other things, provides DIA to ISPs. Our point-to-point transport pipes are even cheaper- for the long haul portion. Local loop really decides the price on those for us. (For those outside the industry, an analogy would be the plane ticket from X to Y is cheap compared to the cabfare from the airport on each end to actual point of origin/destination)
Just wanted to clarify that was DIA and not p2p.
When you go to look for new carriers, consider getting quotes from Zayo (acquired CityNet) and Qwest. Going from NY to Washington (effectively) should be a lot cheaper, considering they are the number 1 and number 8 most populated MSAs (Metropolitan Statistical Areas).