I'm planning to get a backup T1 line for my cabinent in he.net's facility in Fremont. I wonder what to be considered before I get a back T1 line. It would be nice if you could point me where to get it for cheap.

Your probably going to need to run BGP4, unless your providers will do the routing for you.

Check out, http://www.pajo.net/ they list a T1 for $499/mo.

I did a traceroute on them at samspade.org.

Wow! 10ms

Do you recommend me using their service with he.net?
I just want to make sure my servers would still be online when something goes wrong on he.net and its network side.

I've heard good things about them.

You might want to check with HE about getting a second Eth drop, from another part of their network. Might be more cost effective, I'd figure only $100/mo.

Defiantely contact HE - they'd know a LOT more about this than any of this, seeing as how it's their facility! =) I've always loved HE - quality quality stuff.

I wonder if HE has a second, third, or and etc, how come they let their website go down too.

Perhaps they just mirror their site on another ISP in case of outtages?

HE.net has another facility in San Jose.

I just emailed my sales rep to fine the most cost effective solution.

Try XO for your Backup T1. They are right next door. The local loop cannot get any cheaper. Since this going to be only a backup solution, try to get one or two other HE customers to partner with you to reduce the cost. Send me a PM if you need the XO contact details.

Note: XO is in Chapter-11, my rep tells me its a nothing but a reorg. It very likey they come-out of Ch-11 as whole.

ID be careful of XO while i dont know if they will come out or not, theres rumors flying around that they may not... of course rumors are rumors

Problem with XO is I have sent 3 requests for quotes, have not got a response from them and it has been over a month....

:angry:

You should first ask HE what they recommend and allow. Some facilites will not allow you to just bring in anyone (or they may charge a huge crossconnect fee).

Try XO for your Backup T1I would ask around before you buy. As Charles said, the rumors are that they may not make it and are in bad shape.

RackMy,

I asked my sales rep at HE before regarding bringing in a backup T1 line. He told me that HE will help me setup it up. All I have to do is pay the provider directly. He told me this like half a year ago, so I don't know if it is still valid.

Yesterday, I emailed my sale rep to help me find a solution, and he told me about BGP system and $100/month for a second ethernet drop of 128k.

how much traffic do you currently push? 128k isn't going to hold water if you already use 1+mbps on average, it will make your site "unbearably laggy" instead of completely down, which is little good to anyone involved :), ask for a burstable solution, that way you can commit to maybe 64k/s, but burst to whatever capacity is necessary if the link is down, setting up bgp4 to failover wont be cheap either though (getting your own asn, the equipment, the man hours, etc.)

Which do you think is better?

Get a different provider, http://www.pajo.net, and pay $99/month to get a backup T1 line, or pay HE $100/month (128k) for that BGP system.

HE bandwidth is burstable. $100/month is just for 128k, and the lowest they sell is 128k. (Hope I'm right now this one).

Which method do you recommend?

Perhaps, ask specifically for a 'fail-over' ethernet drop. E.g. one that only goes active if the first goes down. I'd think that it would share the Bandwidth bill with the main one.

I just received a response from my sales rep.

----------------
There is a solution to insure your uptime in such cases. We would
recommend you running BGP.

We can use your AS numbers if you have them or we can give you one of
HE.NET's Set up is $100 for the AS.

A second ethernet drop is needed. Recommend 128Kbps for $200 per month since this would only be used in the event that a DOS attached effected the Fremont router.

You will need a router which can handle BGP. We recommend the 2611 Cisco with dual ethernet ports. Be sure to get 64M of DRAM if you decide to go with this solution. The Cisco 2611 comes standard with 32M. Important. Approx cost of this
router is $1600 not counting extra DRAMM

If what happened yesterday and you were utilizing BGP on the 2611 Cisco Router, the router would reroute all traffic to our San Jose router and your service would go uninterrupted. This is an inexpensive insurance policy to insure you and your customers uptime is maintained under such circumstances.
------------------------

If I pay $200/month for a second drop, don't you think it is better to put another $300 to get a T1 at pajo.net

Yeah, go for the T1 and, then you can load balance via that and HE.net.

a cisco 2611 can do bgp4? I didn't think they were powerfull enough, i thought you needed like 256mb to do full bgp4 properly :eek:

Well, they can do BGP. But, I think they only do a partial route table. E.g., the upstream routers, have to maintain the full table.

So they will pay for the local loop from San Jose, that's a long ways away. Not bad pricing!

They just updated me on the price.

The AS it is $100 per month on top of the
$200 for the 128K for a total of $300 per month

Now it is $300/month, not $200/month as I stated above.

Thought about getting your own center???

:D