State of Internet Backbone Companies
There's really only one word that can be used to describe the current sorry state of IP backbone providers. That word is "pathetic."
I will spare you the details of how the following started — those reasons are totally irrelevant. Suffice to say that within a week I got two "maintenance" notifications on one of the transit circuits. Both were to be service-affecting: first one to be used to upgrade the software on the router; the second one to do something with the fiber the circuit rides on. Both were supposed to be about 30 minutes long.
As the two tasks are not connected, any sane company would schedule both to be done at the same time — while one group does physical work on the fiber, the other group does the software upgrade (this is in no way different from upgrading server RAM in the same outage window as upgrading the operating system). But hey, that would be just too logical of a decision — probably last used around the time I was making them on the 2nd floor of 111 8th Avenue at the old AboveNet.
So when a new sales person of the carrier (it seems the old sales person was no longer with the company — he disappeared just after he tried to slip some creative provisions into a new contract before the end of the fiscal quarter) offered dedicated transport VLAN riding on their fiber backbone (but never touching the IP portion) to a different city I wanted to know a little bit more about how similar maintenance issues would affect this transport service.
My questions were simple:
Over last week your company scheduled two service-affecting outages for next week in PHL, which is pretty darn high considering that I have had entire 1 maintenance on Provider A gige in last 3 years, and 0 on Provider B gige.
Will the transport VLAN take the same path and be affected by this rate of service maintenance ?
Is it a protected VLAN or is it a single channel that will be going down all the time during the path maintenance?
By morning there was a response:
Now this is rich... If we call this "maintenance" then it is not an outage. Huh?! Wondering if there would be a better explanation I inquired again:
XXXXX Co scheduled two outages — and 20 minute downtime during a maintenance window is an outage regardless of how you call it — in one week.
The description of the issue in the notification email clearly indicates that it is your fiber issue and it is not between me and XXXXX Co. If that's the case there should be no customer-visible outage unless you are running every customer on a single fiber pair (or even using single fiber with wave splitting to avoid having to run 2nd fiber all together). And if you are running everything on one fiber you are unlikely to get any more of my business.
I thought that maybe I would get a better response to my second and third questions... Nope. Oh goodie, both of my questions are answered:
He must be confused. The concept of a shortest open path comes from OSPF - the IP routing protocol, which operates on layer 3. We have been talking about VLANs, which operate on layer 2 and don't care about what runs above them. Unless of course they have some über-smart super-secret sauce that when dripped on the Cisco gear they use magically makes things happen. That must be it... but I must know more:
I leave you with a little nugget hidden in a footnote:
Because, as we all know, when buying a car one always pays extra for the tires and pedals.
