Since Level(3) is one of the top BW provider, what they have done to become
this popular?. Do they have very good network infrastrucre or they use quality routers & switches?.
Magg - I'm sorry to hear you have had a bad time with Level(3) but I'm interested to know what you based your comment about having the worst downtime than any other provider. Do you have any independant stats to back this up?
Anyway, the Level(3) IP network is based on OC192 (10Gig) backbone links all running via Juniper routers. We mainly have M160 routers but alot of these are being upgraded to T640 models that have 4x backplane capacity.
The core/edge routers are all Cisco 12000 family and 6509 switches, the access are a mixture of 7500, 12000 routers and 6509 switches. We also use Juniper M160 for high bandwidth access customer (oc48, oc192 and 10GE). Customer requiring an mpls solution use Laurel ST200 routers.
The network is very scalable and continuosly being upgraded, a project for 2005 is to swap out 6509 switches to the new 6509 sup720 versions which have 10GE uplinks.
I think the reason people choose Level(3) is based on reliability, performance and the stability of the company. Level(3) has a few $billion in debt but have not sucummed to Chapter 11 like many rivals.
Due to the growth of the internet, the current address space provided by IPv4, with only 4,294,967,296 addresses, has proven to be inadequate. A new protocol, IPv6, has been developed and promises to
facilitate the continual growth of the internet community. IPv6 is capable of offering 2128 internet addresses
which amounts to approximately 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses (no that is not a typo, it is truly 340
trillion3).
Thats what I found from Google, I haven't worked on it yet so have no idea what the real advantages are other than the amount of addresses available.
I have found level 3 is not one of the easiest to work with either.. They wanted me to jump through hoops to connect to them even though I was paying 6 months up front. Although when I went to above net with that offer, it was ALOT easier to get connected. After 3 months I couldn't get connected with Level 3. After a couple weeks I was connected with Above Net.. Btw, this was a GigE port...
I think the only times when connectivity issues might arise are when the customer wants a non standard type of connection handoff or the customer handoff is off-net. Thats when we have to get a leased tail and where hold ups can happen if the LT provider is a bit slow.
In Europe (where I work) our customer installation deadlines are in fact often met well before the requested date. When a trans-atlantic cable called TAT-14 went down last year we turned up 1 x 10gig, 2 x oc48 and a few stm1's within 5 hours of the customer calling in London alone, these normally take upto 4 weeks depending on the architecture.
Ok, I know I'm getting a bit carried away here but I can honestly say that everyone in Level(3) will do the best to turn-up a customer. I'm the sort of person who would not be saying these things if the service was cr@p and I would not be working there either.
I wish that were the case as we paid for the fiber that is now hanging useless. There was a pop for (internal equipment) that I could have connected to about 150 FT from me. I was told by one person that I could connect there, then another told me no, I had to spend a crap load of money so I could get a fiber into equinix. Doesn't sound like anyone was bending over backwards for me..
What makes level(3) as good BW prover?
