how is allegiance as a bandwidth provider in terms of speed,uptime,lagency and peering relationships(including international)? would like to hear some opinions. thanks.

I think they're stronger on the East coast then in the west. I belive they're in Chapter 11 now too. Their network is quite good, with connectivity to Level3 and many providers. Prices are quite good too. Not near cogent, but I would consider quite good.

Originally posted by qm8309
how is allegiance as a bandwidth provider in terms of speed,uptime,lagency and peering relationships(including international)? would like to hear some opinions. thanks.

Horrible. They more or less pulled out of our market and didn't tell us - rerouted our circuit through someone else's equipment. Latency on first hop jumped to 60 ms. They played dumb. We quit the contract for their breach and will probably end up in court.

Kevin

hmm 2 completely different opinions here. anyone else?

Allegiance is very good. Excellent connectivity, 100% uptime in the ~6 months we've had the OC-3 to them thus far, no packet loss, excellent (minimal possible) latency, etc.
One of the better tier 1 networks for sure.
We almost got a second OC-3 to them last month - was one of our top choice networks for putting more bandwidth on (but then in the end we decided to get a new GigE line to AboveNet/MFN instead).

I think that as a part of cutting some of their costs earlier, they pulled out of some tier 2 markets, such as Pittsburg, where Pair is located (hence Kevin's comment), so that would have been the problem there. But as long as you are getting a circuit in a major location such as DC/N.VA, it should be good and provide you with excellent, reliable, high-performing connectivity. At least, it has done so for us. In smaller tier 2 markets, however, it's probably not quite so good, given that it has to be backhauled to the closest major POP and that will add some latency and added points of failure to your circuit (but if that's not so far, it may be still quite decent; Sprint does that a lot - bachauling to a few large POPs, I mean, and is still quite decent - heh, even Pair has a Sprint line still, too).

Originally posted by hjass

I think that as a part of cutting some of their costs earlier, they pulled out of some tier 2 markets, such as Pittsburg, where Pair is located (hence Kevin's comment), so that would have been the problem there. But as long as you are getting a circuit in a major location such as DC/N.VA, it should be good and provide you with excellent, reliable, high-performing connectivity.

The technical issues here aren't the problem. The problem is that they refused to admit what they had done, refused to take any steps to address the situation, and after they agreed to terminate the contract, they have come after us for the balance due anyway - which is why it'll end up in court.

It's about honest business, not about technical performance. No one has treated us so poorly since UUnet.

Sprint does that a lot - bachauling to a few large POPs, I mean, and is still quite decent - heh, even Pair has a Sprint line still, too).

Naturally, Pittsburgh isn't a big POP for most providers. But we have a geographical advantage in that our circuits backhaul to a variety of nearby cities, including Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, New York City, and points in the DC area (Sprint's big POP is in Relay, Maryland).

Kevin

You are right that no company should be treating their customers the way Allegiance has treated you. But, I find that at all big companies there are usually some 'bad apples' who will cause that sort of problems. We've never encountered any such problems with Allegiance, and in the one case there was a potential issue, we just talked to one of their VPs directly to fix it -- that usually helps (we never sign with any company unless we have at least one VP or equivalent personal contact on good, friendly terms with us).

The worst we've ever dealt with, by far, has been XO (I'd strongly recommend for anyone to stay away from XO, it's one of the most unethical, dishonest companies out there -- at least based on our experience), where the circuit (transport) was flapping for many months, totally unsable, yet they would refuse to acknowledge it and refuse to fix it, and also refuse to terminate the contract and on top of that, constantly would be overbilling us and extremely rude in correspondence/talking to us. In comparision to that, UUNet/WCom (also not too good) has been a lot better, and more reasonable acknowledging their faults.

We have not used Allegiance as a backbone provider, however our experience with them as a telcom provider was worse than awful. The manner in which they handled this was unbelievably horrible. In addition to routing our business lines to some unrelated persons home, our lines going up and down, they turned off our service. We called and they just kept referring us from person to person. After talking to 6 different people, they said "We cannot find any record of your account." This was not due to lack of payment. I even personally went to their office with canceled checks in hand along with bills to show them we had service with them.

Finally, after waiting in their lobby for 1.5 hours refusing to leave until I spoke with the regional manager, he met with me. They apologized and said they would get it corrected as quick as possible. It still took them 2 days to restore complete service.

We stopped using them over a year ago. They have continued to send us bills for service they have not provided, including long distance. I am sure we too will end up in court. I look forward to this one!

I WOULD USE DIAL-UP OR A CAN & STRING BEFORE USING ALLEGIANCE TELECOM AGAIN. Even if it were FREE!

Originally posted by hjass
We've never encountered any such problems with Allegiance, and in the one case there was a potential issue, we just talked to one of their VPs directly to fix it -- that usually helps (we never sign with any company unless we have at least one VP or equivalent personal contact on good, friendly terms with us).


Jolly good for you. If I were shopping around for service, I think I could find a few providers who don't have stories like this. That's two stories about ALGX, one story about XO, countless stories about UUnet/WCOM...

We're just sharing our experiences. Anyone is free to ignore them.

Kevin

I highly doubt there is any telco that does not have a long list of such 'horror stories' (if you ask around). And in other cases, e.g. when one has to use the local RBOC, there is no choice anyway.

No personal experience, but from what I have heard network is "ok" but their not on top of things yet...

-Shazad

we have them at one of our facilities. we run bgp and it gets only maybe 5% of our traffic but it has had 100% uptime.