Business T1: Anyone use AT&T or SBC?

[Night201]

How is your service? Any pros cons you've experienced?

 

[AFB]

I am going to get flamed for this, but look on BroadBand Reports for answers. They have people who sell T1s for a living and lots of business customers.

 

[cmetz]

AT&T is good. In the darkness of time, I believe it was IBM's network.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I paid for a service on an AT&T link in Indiana a while back. It was pretty good. Very little downtime, and most of it was scheduled. Seemed to get a little worse after a couple of years, but I would still go back to that company if I was in the market.

 

[deadseasquirrel]

I would recommend a UUnet T1. Only provider that I know of that has 100% uptime SLA guarantee. I work at MCI (which owns the UUnet backbone) and can't tell you how many customers I have that get calls from other vendors, offering prices that cut mine in half, but all my customers tell them to take a hike and quote Heston's "From my cold, dead hands."

Check SBCs T1. SBC often provisions their T1s via Frame Relay... they make the Port 1.536Megs and set the transfer rate (CIR) at 768k. Frame relay allows the CIR to burst up to the port speed if there is network available, but it's not a guarantee.

AT&T is a true Tier1 provider, as is MCI. SBC is not. AT&T had trouble in their network when the last Cisco scare came out months ago. Several hours of downtime. UUnet didn't even hiccup.

But I'm pretty biased since I work for 'em.

deadseasquirrel

 

[cmetz]

deadseasquirrel, UUNet is a great ISP, no question. I work a lot with you folks and try to steer customers to UUNet all the time because it's usually the best service. But "100% uptime SLA guarantee" is pure unadulterated marking BS. First off, that's not what the guarantee IS. Second of all, MCI is horrible about actually applying the credits. If you work for them, you know full well just how incompetent your billing folks are.

 

[Aves]

Originally posted by: cmetz
But "100% uptime SLA guarantee" is pure unadulterated marking BS

Indeed. There is no way to offer a 100% uptime guarantee on an access line. It may be 100% within the network but nobody really cares about that.

I used to get excellent service from MCI up until about 6 months ago when the group I usually dealt with merged with another. Now it's OK service but not as good as it used to be.

 

[BigFatCow]

we have a full t1 line from birch, we havent had it very long but its fast and it hasnt gone down yet. The price is also very cheap.

 

[deadseasquirrel]

I agree about marketing BS. But, I assure you, the 100% uptime includes the local loop as well. Now, it is prudent to acknowledge that nobody can truly guarantee that some jackhole won't come and dig where they aint 'posta. So, yes, you would then be at the billing group's mercy to issue those credits. But, whether marketing BS or not, MCI is the first company to even step up with a 100% offer. So, when the local bell drops a loop on ATT, and ATT tells ya "Sorry, we won't credit for that".... MCI will.

I, however, cannot comment on MCI's general billing response. I work with the larger accounts (such as Dell), and sales is meticulous about getting copies of the bills BEFORE they hit the customer to ensure accuracy. I feel safe assuming that the average small business customer does not get that same attention. Billing is a plague across the entire telecom industry.

Just for reference, the SLA is on MCI's site.

 

[Aves]

I must say I'm impressed.

A 100% Gaurantee that covers the local loop seems risky. Any jackhole that knocks out a crossbox or RT can cost MCI a lot of dough.

 

[Boscoh]

I hate SBC. Plain and simple.

We use them for multiple T1 circuits...and yes they are all frame relay. The uptime is pretty good. I'd say we've had about 97% uptime. But it's not that 99.97% they "garuntee" and we've never gotten a credit.
The problems with SBC are:

1) The promise to be "proactive" and know about problems and inform you about them before you do. Thats a load of crap. I've informed them of problems they didnt know about many times.

2) They fail to inform you of planned network outages. Once one of our circuits went down for 8 hours (during a business day), and our account manager said he had sent us a notice a couple hours before it went down saying it would be down for an emergency repair. The timestamp of his email was about 5 minutes after we had called him to ask him what the hell was going on. We got it when our circuit came back up. Later I called tech support, they told me that their SONET ring that services us went down (nevermind that we dont have SONET service, and that SONET is supposed to have two redundant rings).

3) Their tech support are a bunch of morons. I've heard everything from their SONET ring went down, to the cable company cut their line, all sorts of crap.

4) Their installers misconfigure devices, and dont give you the passwords to devices that you bought and own.

I could go on and on. My boss loves them because we get pricing for our circuits that's maybe 3% lower than anyone else since we have our local/long distance/data all through them, but he isnt the one up at 3am when the link fails. I've heard nothing but good things about AT&T and UUNet....I'd stay away from SBC.

 

[cmetz]

deadseasquirrel, "This will not include unavailability continuing for one hour or less" In engineering, we don't call that 100%. In marketing, that's 110% 😉

Covering the local loop is quite cool, though. It helps motivate MCI to keep the LEC in line.

Boscoh, what your story illustrates is the problem with Internet service. To a PHB, a T1 is a T1. I have a fast connection to the Internet, it's cheap, what else is there to care about? I can't tell you how many times somebody's gotten T1 service from Crazy Bob's ISP & Bait Shop and had major peering performance issues, repair issues, and so on, impacting their ability to do their jobs and costing them tons of lost man-time... but spending $100/mo more to go to a quality ISP is out of the question. Many PHBs want it cheap, and just can't see anything but that monthly recurring cost.

Luckily, many is not all.

 

[deadseasquirrel]

Originally posted by: aves2k
A 100% Gaurantee that covers the local loop seems risky. Any jackhole that knocks out a crossbox or RT can cost MCI a lot of dough.

True, but SLAs go both ways. MCI orders more circuits from SBC than just about anybody else (same with Verizon) and therefore have pretty strong SLAs between them, not to mention special attention for trouble resolution. It's the wonderful dichotomy of being the largest customer and largest competitor.

Originally posted by: Boscoh
I hate SBC. Plain and simple.

1) The promise to be "proactive" and know about problems and inform you about them before you do. Thats a load of crap. I've informed them of problems they didnt know about many times.

Somebody knew about them, believe me. Just not the idiot you got a hold of... see your #3.

3) Their tech support are a bunch of morons. I've heard everything from their SONET ring went down, to the cable company cut their line, all sorts of crap.

Yep, this is even true with MCI. Every provider seems to have horrible 1st tier tech support. Useless useless useless. I just had a rough appointment with a client because of this issue. The resolution was to have the customer simply call that 800# to reach the incompetent folks, then page his account team with that trouble ticket #, so WE can escalate it and get it resolved.

4) Their installers misconfigure devices, and dont give you the passwords to devices that you bought and own.

It's common-place to lock customers out of equipment that they are leasing or if it was thrown-in with the product and will be ripped out if service is cancelled. However, you're saying that you own the router. So, by all means, you should be able to get into it.

My boss loves them because we get pricing for our circuits that's maybe 3% lower than anyone else since we have our local/long distance/data all through them

Sounds like you need to open up for bids and let your bossman know that there's lotsa other providers out there now that can do the same thing.

 

[Boscoh]

Oh I was able to get into it...it's all in the registers 😉

I've also had tech support guys (the L2 and L3 guys) get irritated with me for changing the passwords on those boxes, and they cant log into it. What's funny is that some of them dont even ask me if they can login to it, they just ask me what the password is when they cant get into it, it seems their first instinct is to always try to login to the router whenever there is a problem. I just tell them that SBC doesnt own the boxes, we do, and that I'm perfectly competent with Cisco routers so they can just tell me what to do...and if they dont like it, they can pass the case off to someone else who can deal with it because that's the way it is. No one logs into those routers except for me and a couple others in our company who are authorized to.

Another problem we have with SBC is that our account team changes so often we usually dont have updated contact info for them. Very rarely we do get any info saying that we have a new account manager or whoever, we usually find that out when we try to contact the person who isnt there anymore. Then it takes forever to find someone who can track down who our new account member is. I think in four years we've had maybe 6 or 7 different account managers. Most of those within the last two years.

 

[Almighty1]

Originally posted by: cmetz
AT&T is good. In the darkness of time, I believe it was IBM's network.

You're thinking of AT&T Global Network Services (prserv.net) which was IBM GNS before. AT&T WorldNet aka ip.att.net is actually something AT&T started up with in 1995 on a 2 year contract reselling BBNPlanet (what's known as GTE Internetworking/Genuity -> Level3 today). BBNPlanet used InternetMCI (now known as Cable & Wireless USA) for anything they can't reach directly. AT&T WorldNet finally built their own backbone in 1997. There is also AT&T Emerging Network Services (ENS) attens.net which used to be CERFNet, a regional research network.