What is the deal with Alter net? All hosts that use Alter net routers are very slow at times. Qwest seems to be more reliable!

AlterNet = UUNet

I don't know anything about the slowdowns you're referring to, but UUNet is one of the most expensive backbones around. Generally they're known for decent service/quality/speed.

i worked on a server one switch away from the router in the UUnet datacenter for a client..

downloaded pulpfiction dvd rip in 30 mins... all 500 megs of it.. from across the country..

Experienced the same problem using computers from Europe...

Originally posted by Planet Z
AlterNet = UUNet

I don't know anything about the slowdowns you're referring to, but UUNet is one of the most expensive backbones around. Generally they're known for decent service/quality/speed.

They've been known as the ISP's ISP for a lot of years, but over the past year or so, their quality went from category leader to average. The latency is really bad, and they've developed an outage problem as well.

They are better than a lot of other national backbone transit providers (Level 3, Savvis and other sucky companies) , but they are no longer deserving of their reputation as the best, or their high prices, which are the highest.

Price comparison for T1's worth of backbone transit (monthly rate, same contract duration):

Verio: $850
Intermedia $1200
UUnet: $2500

Hi Phoenix:

What would you consider the top backbones (and how do they fare price-wise)? I'm really not an expert when it comes to backbones, just my own personal experience and what I've heard from others.

It won't be reported, but, Vendor-X (which you can guess, not Cisco) had a serious BGP bug which caused their major backbone routers to pass bad routes. The internet isn't monitored for QoS by the government like the phone companies are but after the hush-hush issue that fell down over exodus and many other tier 1's this weekend, people like Paul Vixie might press for it.

here are some URLs:

http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg04697.html

Most of this information from Exodus comes via NDA if you subscribe to their trouble-ticket mailing list. All I can tell you is that what you read in that whole thread is not untrue.

ALSO

http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg04730.html

Have phun,
I have no life cuz I read NANOG,
davidu

Originally posted by kickster
What is the deal with Alter net? All hosts that use Alter net routers are very slow at times. Qwest seems to be more reliable!
Last night we had a pretty bad outage on UUNet lines. Anyone else experience the same outage? The outages were specific to areas being served by Orlando, Florida and Atlanta, Georgia's portions of UUNet. If you didn't flow through those portions, chances are UUNet ran fine for you.

allera: no problems down here in Miami. UU is one of our backbones and we didn't have any slowdowns w/ them. In fact, I haven't noticed any problems with UU lately (There were some issues a couple months ago).

Originally posted by Planet Z
allera: no problems down here in Miami. UU is one of our backbones and we didn't have any slowdowns w/ them. In fact, I haven't noticed any problems with UU lately (There were some issues a couple months ago).

Take a look at this:

7 500.POS2-3.GW3.ORL1.ALTER.NET (63.122.231.65) 1140.897 ms 1159.085 ms 1151.969 ms
8 152.at-1-1-0.XR1.ATL1.ALTER.NET (146.188.233.138) 1218.956 ms 1159.542 ms 1198.782 ms

64 bytes from web.focalhosting.com (209.212.134.21): icmp_seq=360 ttl=230 time=17.064 sec
64 bytes from web.focalhosting.com (209.212.134.21): icmp_seq=361 ttl=230 time=18.065 sec

Heh. There were some serious issues going on last night. This started at about 8:56pm EST and lasted a few hours.

Where did the ping times spike in the trace? That's generally where the problem is. It looks like it was already bad when you hit Orlando, unless it spiked there.

18 sec ping times? Now that's something you don't see everyday. :eek:

Originally posted by Planet Z
Hi Phoenix:

What would you consider the top backbones (and how do they fare price-wise)? I'm really not an expert when it comes to backbones, just my own personal experience and what I've heard from others.

For our purposes-purchasing transit from our local Internet backbone network over their National Internet backbone networks- we ranked them using an Internet map that shows how many other networks are directly connected to their backbone network

WorldCom (aka Cable & Wireless)
UUnet
Verio
Intermedia

We haven't used C&W in a couple of years, so I'm not sure on what their pricing is, but i listed the prices of the other three above. C&W does have a real problem with their service and billing so be sure and factor in the cost of time spent arguing and escalating with their support staff, as well as legal fees necessary to get them to stop billing for services after the contract has ended and the connection has been shut down (8 months after in our case).

There are a lot of other national backbone providers out there, but these are the best connected currently.

Originally posted by Planet Z
Where did the ping times spike in the trace? That's generally where the problem is. It looks like it was already bad when you hit Orlando, unless it spiked there.

18 sec ping times? Now that's something you don't see everyday. :eek:
Those were the spikes. Everything else seemed ok, alter was always in the sub-100 range. 1000ms is not acceptable. And since everything around here travels through Orlando first and then Atlanta second, and the same way back, massive slowdowns take place and makes everyone generally unhappy.

As for the 18 second ping times, that's the highest I've seen as well. I guess if you let it wait long enough (notice the icmp_seq numbers?) you'll get a pretty high ping rate back.

Everything seems to be back to normal, but those slowdowns really kill ya.

Originally posted by Phoenix

WorldCom (aka Cable & Wireless)
UUnet
Verio
Intermedia


uhh...you mean:

WorldCom = UUNET

Cable & Wireless bought out the MCI backbone when WorldCom and MCI merged (then WorldCom sales rep stole all the old MCI customers back :)).