Changing ISP?

[John Kaftan <jkaftan () UTICA EDU>]

We recently had an extended outage on our MCI (VerizonBusiness) connection.
We were down for 2 days and customer support was very poor during this time.

Now we are faced with a decision as well as building redundancy into our
connection.  Here are my questions:

1.      Should we leave MCI and suffer the pain of changing ISPs and
receiving a new set of Public IPs?

2.      Can anyone else relate their recent experiences with MCI positive or
negative?

3.      Also, is it sufficient to use a single ISP for redundancy if they
give us separate local loops, via separate ILECs, into opposite ends of the
campus, to separate COs?

4.      Can anyone speak to setting up redundancy with separate ISPs and
BGP?

We have not talked about cost with any ISPs but I imagine it would be much
more affordable using a single ISP.     

We are planning owning our next set of IP addresses.  I'm told there might
be a chance that we could keep our current set.  We'll see.

John Kaftan
Utica College