Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Colocation and Data Centers : Qwest vs Level3

[dg_ak]

My DC is switching from Level3 to Qwest as our primary bandwidth provider. They are also going to use Williams bandwidth along with the BGP setup. The switch is due to numerous problems casued by the merger of genuity with level3. Other than the outages i have been impressed with the speed of the level3 network. Can i expect the same with Qwest? Are they Tier 1 like level3?

[KarlZimmer]

I'd definately say Level(3) is higher quality than Qwest. I wonder how they ended up picking Qwest. Never saw great quality or anything from there end and I know people who haven't liked their support that much either. Did they have BGP before with L3 and another provider? If so and they're switching to Qwest and Williams they're downgrading, likely to get better pricing, but if they were single-homed with Level(3) before you're about the same, imho.

[Dennis Nugent]

For traffic destined to North America, if they are doing bgp with both Qwest and Williams, you will see good performance. Williams has significantly improved thier network

[XtremeBandwidth]

Only problems I have herd about from the tansition of Genuity and L3 is if the site was a Genuity site and not Level3. Then their may have been some issues. Level3 is also closing \ pulling out of some of the old Genuity sites.

I would sugguest BGP with Level3 and Qwest, unless like I said above is the case.

[johnewart]

Qwest is not a Tier1 based on actual traffic, but the have a farely good network. Between them and Williams you will be fine for an average web site.

[wahoos20]

Would be curious to know why they dropped Level3. I know they had a major outage a few weeks back. Any thoughts?

For Q and Williams/WilTel, you should be fine.

[KarlZimmer]

Sorry if my message was misread, but I did mean that if they're switching from just L3 to BGP of Williams and Qwest you're definately in good shape. If they had a BGP with L3 in the mix though I'd be wondering why the made the change.

[dg_ak]

The reason i got from the DC was that Level3 keep dropping their BGP config from their core routers during their transition into the Genuity network. (My DC was originally with Genuity) They have had numerous issues keeping the connection up this past year and obvioulsy the BGP was not working so we lost the Internet completely several times. The speed has been great but the uptime horrible. I just hope Qwest+Williams with BGP will be at least on par with the speed of Level3.

[edge100x]

As far as the speed, it mainly depends on the quality of the peering those two backbones have in whatever city you are in.

I'd recommend using the Qwest and Williams looking glasses to run some traceroutes to destination IPs on other networks (such as routers or name servers of other backbones in your city) to get a better idea of what to expect. Compare it to the Level3 looking glass results for the same IPs.

http://stat.qwest.net/looking_glass.html
http://lookingglass.wcg.net/
http://www.level3.com/LookingGlass/

[jsw6]

I'm not a big fan of Williams / WilTel from an IP perspective. The engineering decisions they make are qualified with remarks like, "the equinix switch fabrics do not provide sufficient uptime," which is not true.

Having had a four hour conversation with their tier-2 engineering staff about a multi-city outage affecting one of my clients in January, I was not impressed with their ability to trouble-shoot problems on their own backbone. The root cause of the outage was a gross configuration mistake that should never have been made, and should have been quickly identified and corrected. Lack of change management? You bet. Four hours of downtime that were unnecessary? Yes.

If WilTel is substantially less expensive than your other options, they may be the best cost/benefit choice for you. I buy transit for clients quite frequently, though, and they are not high on my list of transit vendors.

[wahoos20]

Hmm, never experienced that with WilTel directly. Are you buying direct or working through a reseller.

[jsw6]

If I "bought through a reseller" I wouldn't have WilTel had a multi-city outage. I realize a lot of folks on WHT are too small to deal with "big" transit vendors directly, and try to make themselves appear larger than they really are. I assure you, I am not one of those folks.