RE: Qwest Transit

["Gironda, Andre" <agironda () ebay com>]

We probably get Qwest transit cheaper than you, and yes, it is the
cheapest in the industry.  Not too bad considering Qwest is definitely
in the top ten largest Tier 1 providers, and probably even the 3rd or
4th largest transit-AS networks according to a recent CAIDA study:
http://www.caida.org/analysis/topology/rank_as/

We connect to them at one of their Cybercenters, and I can only speak
for the transit relationship we have.  Connected to them 10/23, BGP
sessions have been up for longer than 4 weeks.  I remember calling
them once when a BGP session went down over two weeks ago, and they
said they didn't have 24/7 network support at first, then forwarded
me on to somebody on the east coast who said they "normally are 9-5
EST".  That was the only thing that worried me.  We connect to them
via 2xGbE to dual MSFC2 Catalyst 65xx/SUP2's.  One of the MSFC's had
reset and it did take them a long time to determine this.  It's good
that they did determine the RFO and, in fact, were very quick to
respond (I wish they were proactive about it, however).
http://www.qwest.com/about/qwest/QwestCyberCenters/index.html

However, they are only our 20+ largest AS for destinations in terms
of traffic.  They are in our top 30, which means they are still probably
worth the money that we are paying them.  And it's over 107,000 routes,
so that's a pretty big table for transit-AS destinations.  I think their
peering is sufficient, but it's hard to tell with our other directly
connected transits and peers.  We use them for a large portion of our
outbound traffic right now, and I haven't seen any performance impact.
Take at look at their network with some 'show ip bgp' action:
http://www.routeviews.org/ http://stat.qwest.net/looking_glass.html

It sounds like you have confidence in the circuit, so, in your shoes,
I would move a lot of traffic to Qwest (especially if cost savings is
what you are looking for).  As a long term strategy, you might want to
look at the cost of Qwest transit vs. the cost of moving a lot of your
traffic to peering.  Having an SLA might be nice for management, but
having those peering relationships can really help general network
operation and performance, as well as the bottom line in terms of dollars.
Here is some data on the Qwest SLA and network:
http://www.networkcomputing.com/1114/1114f15.html

I think Qwest does try to do some good 'best-exit', but they clearly don't
have the experience that other providers do.  You can local_pref and path-
prepend all you want, but make sure you have a good eye on all your traffic
and routing table changes.  If anybody has more information on how Qwest
does 'best-exit' and handles MED's or anything else like their acceptance
of RFC1998++ ISP-style BGP communities or route filters or any other
operational experience, please post.

-dre

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andy Dills [mailto:andy () xecu net]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 1:46 PM
> To: nanog () merit edu
> Subject: Qwest Transit
>
> Ok, we have an opportunity to get Qwest bandwidth amazingly cheap.  I
> can't disclose the details (NDA), but bottom line is it looks like the
> cheapest in the industry and because there is no loop 
> involved, it could
> be one hell of a deal on a ds3.
>
> I'm not a fan of Qwest, traditionally. I've had some (somewhat famous)
> run-ins with their sales people, and I personally know plenty 
> of companies
> who over several years have had tons of complaints with 
> various aspects of
> their organization.
>
> However, I'm not interested in all of that at the moment. I need to
> evaulate, without all of my longheld bias, whether or not Qwest can
> provide quality DS3 transit. The traditional knock on Qwest is that
> they're an over-built under-peered network with poor support. 
> But a lot of
> time has passed, so surely they would have addressed the 
> peering issues by
> now? I can deal with poor support...the circuit is a simple 
> cross connect,
> and our bgp filter changes are fairly uncommon.
>
> Can anybody speak positively or negatively about the quality of Qwest
> transit? We ordered a metered ds3 for a backup circuit, but with
> the pricing I'm seeing, I'm really tempted to localpref and 
> prepend our
> announcements such that most of the traffic flows through 
> Qwest. I plan on
> trying it out regardless, but I'd like to hear from the list first.
>
> Thanks,
> Andy