Re: Changing ISP?

[Rob Whalen <rwhalen () STMARYS-CA EDU>]

see response below...

John Kaftan wrote:

> 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
John,
We recently went with MCI's package of data and phone service. They
promised us the same level of service at a lower price, however buried
in the contract it states that modems (credit card lines) would not
work, and that faxes would be problematic. The modem issues were easily
dealt with by buying lines from ATT. The faxes were more difficult. Many
departments had published faxes and didn't want to change numbers. So
their choices are: get a POTS line, retry incoming and outgoing faxes
until all pages are sent(you can't send more than two pages at a time
and graphics intensive pages don't send at all), or use one of a new
block of numbers. Either way they are unhappy clients. We have also had
two all day outages in the two months we've used MCI. Their techs don't
seem to have a clue, after the last incident they couldn't even tell us
what they fixed, just that it was a problem on their network. Our phone
tech is ready to quit!
Setting up BGP between ISPs is a full time job. We've got a second DS3
for failover, and our old ISP still up, but with the route remarked out
for now in case we need to switch back.
Rob