🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4ec55q$6mk@morgoth.sfu.ca>,
Peter Van Epp <vanepp@news.sfu.ca> wrote:

>	That said, as Sam pointed out in his response, Mindlink has been 
>bought by Istar and like Sam I expect they will move to the Istar backbone
>(which is reputed to also be T3) when the current Ubiquity contract is up
>(but that is just speculation on my part). Some of the local providers are
>on Istar now (Wimsey is for sure, and in fact has also been bought by IStar),
>and from something Curt posted I believe that Portal is a current Istar
>customer as well.

Portal, Wimsey and ICE On-line are three customers of Istar. I talked
to Mike Patterson yesterday, and so here's the current situation as I
remember it:

Istar currently has three T1 links from Vancouver to MCI in
Sacramento, a T1 link from Vancouver back to Ottawa, and a T3 from
somewhere back east to MCI in New York. There's also a T1 from
Vancouver into ANS somewhere. The cross-Canada backbone provides
a redundant link in case the link to Sacramento goes down, and this
does indeed work. (It's a bit slower, but connectivity is maintained.)

>In addition Cyberstore has or at least had a T1 link
>to Seattle (that is old information, and they may have upgraded)...

Last I checked, Cyberstore was going through Westel. Westel seemed
poised to try to get into the Internet business in a big way eight
months ago, but they seem to have gotten a lot quieter (and fired
a few of their sales staff) since. Despite the fact that they are
by far the cheapest providers of connectivity in town, I don't get
the impression they're selling all that much. This could be due to
the lack of ancillary services. (When I talked to them last year
they didn't even have a news server or name services. I believe
they were looking at working with Cyberstore to supply anything
beyond the basic pipe.)


>I don't know
>who Internet Direct buys bandwidth from, they may have their own link to 
>somewhere...

They've bought a direct link to MCI in the States. There are at
least two vendors in town who are happy to sell cross-border links
to get you to a NAS POP in the US. Of course, this lengthens the
non-redundant portion of the link, and you've also got to set up
your own AS.

>I expect that Stuart from Wimsey will jump in and convince
>you that a T1 is faster than an Ethernet over ATM connection anyway :-)

Well, you must admit that running a bidirectional point-to-point
connection over a CSMA/CD medium is hardly an optimal use of
resources. :-)

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.	
Vancouver, BC   (604) 257-9400		De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.