Where I work we have a dual wan setup with a T1 and Comcast Business (16mbit down and 2mbit up). I monitor both links from our gateway as well as Zenoss. The main difference between the links are SLA. There are many arguments for and against SLA's I tend to think that they are pretty worthless but they are a way out of a contract if the provider isn't living up to their responsibilities. So here's my experience with both links.<div>
<br></div><div>Now I'm in southern NH so YMMV at your location.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Speed: </b>We have consistently gotten 16+ mbit's down on Comcast and 2 mbit's up. So on the business side they don't seem to over subscribe as much as they do on the consumer side.</div>
<div><br></div><div><b>Support:</b> I haven't had to rely on either vendor for much support but both our T1 and Business Comcast support numbers quickly get you to a real tech support person, located in the US. Level 1 tech support at a T1 type provider tends to be a little more knowledgeable but the Comcast level 1 support guys are surprisingly competent and not just walking you through a flow chart.</div>
<div><br></div><div><b>Availability:</b> This is very slightly in favor of the T1 but it's really a toss up as I only looked back 3 months. But here's some numbers and my thought on them.</div><div><br></div><div>
Link Availability Number of Outages Max Duration Avg</div><div>T1 99.99746% 12 1:29 0:17</div><div>Comcast 99.97244% 4 29:14 9:02 </div>
<div><br></div><div>So you're paying a lot of money to gain that last 00.025%. Also to be fair to Comcast here the max outage duration for Comcast was at 2:16am on 5/19. And there was also 5:34 outage at 2:04am. I never called them to find out what the cause of that outage was but I'm sure if I look back far enough I'll see a similar outage on the T1. Also another of those 4 outages was due to me rebooting the Comcast router, more on that in a second. So if we take out those 3 data points then the Comcast line would look like this.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Comcast 99.99900% 1 0:19 0:19</div><div><br></div><div><b>Comcast Warts</b>: We have had one problem with Comcast. I think it's more of an issue with the SMC router/cable modem that they gave us. But every now and then it will stop routing certain packets properly. It's a very odd problem that manifests itself way down stream from any Comcast network and will only affect 1 site and the only way to get it to route properly is to reboot the router. It takes 1 minute for the router to reboot. So when someone here complains that they can't access 1 site but everything else is working I bounce the router to solve the problem.</div>
<div><br></div><div>During the ice storm a while back we lost power to our building for 1 week. Luckily we were running our servers and routers on a generator. But our Comcast link was down for a week while our T1 was up and running the entire time surprisingly.</div>
<div><br></div><div>--</div><div>David</div><div><br></div><div><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Richard 'Doc' Kinne <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rkinne@aavso.org">rkinne@aavso.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">Good Morning, Folks:<br>
<br>
I'm in the midst of taking a look at re-doing our internet service. We<br>
currently have a sychronous DS1 line (1.5Mbps in and out) which, being<br>
the non-profit we are, has been all we've been able to afford based on<br>
what we have. This DS1 line, with 24 routable internet addresses costs<br>
us about $600 month. If I go to a 36 month contract I can get it down<br>
to $450 or so.<br>
<br>
However, we're now in a position where we need a much larger download<br>
pipe than an upload pipe, so I started taking a look at asynchronous<br>
solutions. Taking a look at Comcast they were able to offer me 20Mbps<br>
down and 2Mbps up and 13 (down from 24) IP addresses for about<br>
$95/month.<br>
<br>
Now even if that 20Mbps down actually turns out to be, say, 5Mbps down<br>
there is still a night and day difference in the cost. It is such a<br>
large difference that I'm trying to figure out what I am fundamentally<br>
missing. Based on what I know know I can't think I could make any<br>
other recommendation to my Director. And I can't think how any other<br>
service, including the one I have now, remains competitive.<br>
<br>
I feel I'm missing something fundamental here. What are the<br>
experiences anyone on the list have had?<br>
----<br>
Doc Kinne, AAVSO<br>
(From the Gmail Web Interface)<br>
<br>
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