How Do You Choose a WAN Carrier & Technology? 19
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?"
The number one consideration (Score:3, Insightful)
reliability of the company (Score:3, Insightful)
Limited carriers limit choices. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Limited carriers limit choices. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Limited carriers limit choices. (Score:1)
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.
I perfer dealing with CLECs (Score:2)
Yes, my personal homepage has info on GRE&OSPF-over-IPSEC.
Re:I perfer dealing with CLECs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I perfer dealing with CLECs (Score:2)
Re:I perfer dealing with CLECs (Score:2)
Re:I perfer dealing with CLECs (Score:2)
I'm going to try linux-freeswan to linux-native ipsec with gre inside soon.
Re:Depends on your needs (Score:1)
In the late 90's I was working in WCOM's manageded services (building / maintaining netview maps / servers). We had many large customers. One was Cisco. Cisco was, in fact, offering a service with it's products, that is, some sort of monitoring [here's the funny part] AT&T bought a slew of equipment from Cisco, getting this service, which we eneded up monitoring.
For those not in the know. WCOM & AT&T are the Ford & General Motors of the data line world.
I'm sure AT&T never knew
Big providers aren't always safe (Score:2)
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.
Re:Big providers aren't always safe (Score:2)
Last mile, just one choice (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Some criteria from a 120+ Frame/DSL WAN guy (Score:2)
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.
Choices (Score:1)
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.