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Technology

How Do You Choose a WAN Carrier & Technology? 19

Posted by Cliff from the what-questions-do-you-ask dept.
Giger51 asks: "I'm trying to get a better idea of how a business goes about choosing a carrier & technology for their Wide Area Network. For the last little while, it's been difficult for a lot of the carriers out there. Those difficulties have resulted in questionable accounting practices and bankruptcies. When trying to make the decision, what are the key points that are considered? What technology (IP, Frame Relay, ATM...) are you avoiding or looking for?"
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How Do You Choose a WAN Carrier & Technology? More

How Do You Choose a WAN Carrier & Technology?

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  • The number one consideration (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mordant ( 138460 ) on Thursday December 12, 2002 @11:46AM (#4871270)
    should be whether they'll be in business next week, heh.

  • reliability of the company (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stonebeat.org ( 562495 ) on Thursday December 12, 2002 @11:48AM (#4871298) Homepage
    actually reliability of the company must be considered first. what good is a high-end technology, if it will last due to monetary problems.

  • Limited carriers limit choices. (Score:4, Informative)

    by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Thursday December 12, 2002 @12:17PM (#4871590)
    Even in large metropolitan areas there are usually only a few carriers. None of the carriers offer all of the technologies that are out there so, you need to first look at the technologies that are available from the carriers in your area.

    The next step, after making a list of the available technologies, is to determine which one you need to use. This is determined by what you are trying to do. Are you setting up an ATM that only needs a 9600 baud connection or are you trying to do multi-site video conferencing that will require several megabits of bandwidth. This will limit your choices further, depending on what is available. Also, general cost of the technology may be factored here but, cost should not significantly affect your decision yet.

    Hopefully at this point, you still have at least a couple of carriers to choose from. At this point you must look at reliability, responsiveness, whether the carrier will be around in a year or five years, SLAs and finally cost.Usually you're lucky to find two or more carriers to choose from in the end.

    One last note, don't mistake carriers for service providers. There may be lots of service providers to choose from but, when you look closer, you'll likely find that they are all simply reselling the services of one or two carriers.

    • One last note, don't mistake carriers for service providers. There may be lots of service providers to choose from but, when you look closer, you'll likely find that they are all simply reselling the services of one or two carriers.

      I have to second this opinion, in the past I've had good luck with Sprints IP and Frame service in both the US and in Canada. You will want to avoid the little guys like GT and even my arch enemy MTS. Another important thing to consider is the after sale support your account gets, how you get treated once the money is in their pocket can change drastically. I found the Sprint Canada folk to be a hell of a lot more responsive and helpful than either team from Bell or Telus.

      • I personally use Sprint for eight Frame-Relay WAN links across the US with a hub in New York, and I find their service and support to be awesome, although my sales representative is helpless and I find them changing TAC's on me constantly. However, when I have a problem with my service, their management center usually calls me before I even know that it's down.

        One downfall to all this? Price. I also pay about $10,000 a month for the luxury of nearly 100% uptime. That's a lot of cash for a non-profit like ourselves, but well worth it.
  • Clecs have the advantage of when you say "i want x" they will see about getting you x, because in the end they only want money to pay their bills for that month. I tend to look into the finances (like if they are making a profit, and have been making a profit) before I would let somebody do business with them. I tend to see people using frame for just carrying ip datagrams in between offices. Using a Telco Grade Circuit only gets you one thing... a mandated 90% uptime. Buy Accordingly and do consider looking at just buying cheapo a/sdsl circuits and running a vpn over them all. Something such as GRE&OSPF-over-IPSEC kicks ass once setup well.... and using something like GRE allows you to bridge networks if your that insane... Enjoy.

    Yes, my personal homepage has info on GRE&OSPF-over-IPSEC.
    • IPSEC over cheap connections works fine until you have a setup that cannot go down. I did some consulting for a company that had 5+ tills in 9 locations. If the connection went down, the tills didn't function, and they might as well close the doors and kick everyone out. 56k Frame Relay was more expensive than a bunch of cable modems and OBSD boxes, but the fact that he didn't have to put a AS/400, an admin at each location, and could centralize his costs made up for it.
    • GRE/IPSEC is great, i've used that to set up site to site VPN's with cisco gear before. GRE adds the ability to carry multicast packets accross the tunnel, a capability that straight IPSEC does not have. end result is this allows you to run OSPF or EIGRP accross your VPN tunnels. i've used GRE/IPSEC over DSL as a VPN backup to frame relay in an HSRP pair, it rules.
      • Oh yeah its sweet..... I've run a decently large network between linux boxes with it. It worked with out a hitch. I'd like to try cisco-linux/freeswan interop some day... But that most likely wont happen any time soon as I lost my job a few months ago :(

        I'm going to try linux-freeswan to linux-native ipsec with gre inside soon.
  • Our frame-relay service used to be provided by MCI. One day, it all fell apart. Our region was cut off from all our East Coast facilities, and we actually NEED our WAN to do business every day.

    Funny thing was, no one at MCI was returning calls. It was over a day before anyone was able to look at the problem. Why?

    Because they had all gone on a cruise. As in, they ALL were somewhere in the Bahamas.

    I'm now in a different department of the company, but I believe IT currently deals with AT&T.
  • Unless your buildings are wired by a company like Intellispace, your last mile connection is going to be physically connected by whomever has the local monopoly (like Verizon in NYC).
    So, if you go with any other company, and installation/troubleshooting needs to be done, you *still* will be dealing with the local monopoly. When they have to prioritze serviceing one of their customers, or a 3rd party's customer, guess who wins? 4 months of T-1 hell made that point very clear to me.

  • 1. Price
    2. Low provider network saturation (3rd party utilization reports provided). No oversubscription.
    3. Good SLAs, reasonably priced
    4. Credits for failing to provide SLA agreed service.
    5. Phone number to the carriers NOC (we actually contract all of our network monitoring, they have the #)
    6. Monthly reviews of performance and pricing with an account rep/team.

    And remember, a contract works both ways. If you receive shoddy service, withhold payment for a few periods to discuss performance.
  • You have to make a few choices, mainly on layers one and two of the OSI model.

    Layer One: Copper or Fiber
    This isn't so much up to you as it is up to your phone company in basically all instances. The first T1 we had installed in our building was copper. It required very little equipment. After the copper T1 was up and running, Verizon said they planned on switching us to fiber and put fiber in the building. They haven't changed that first T1. However, we just got two new T1s installed and they're fiber. But, the fiber required a whole wall full of equipment. More points of failure in the end I guess.

    Layer 2: Frame Relay, ATM, Ethernet, HDLC
    Frame Relay is pretty ubiquitous for T1s and what not. However, ATM is pretty popular and the phone companies like to sell it. Phone companies tend to like building your WAN by plugging your different locations into one ATM switch and then giving you bandwidth that way. Ethernet is being used by companies like Cogent who just give you an easy Gigabit Ethernet handoff to plugin to your hardware. Pretty simple. I really don't know how many people use HDLC for their WANs, but it is the default layer 2 protocol for Cisco routers.

    The bottom line is get multiple links from different providers and run BGP if you can. BGP allows you to advertise all your links as different ways to get to your site. You need a fairly large block of IPs to do it, but it's neat if you can. I'd go for the big providers: Genuity, Sprint, AT&T, Level 3, Cable & Wireless, UU Net, etc. And make sure you get competent personnel to set it all up.

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Crazee Edeee, his prices are INSANE!!!

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