🚀 go-pugleaf

whoa here... Let's make sure everybody understands the relationship.
MCNC operates the network for the University System under contract. The
decision was made by representatives of all the institutions. MCNC did
not make this decision on their own.

The price difference was HUGE. We are talking nearly twice as much for
MCI as Sprint. This was on the order of a couple hundred grand more per
DS3. MCI increased their prices from our previous contract
significantly. Furthermore MCI now charges by traffic levels not fixed
bandwith charges.

For those of us who had been dealing with it, MCI was not perfect
either. Does anybody recall the reliability of the link to Atlanta? We
had to scream until they moved it to Greensboro to get any relief. There
was one instance when we had a multi-day outage while with MCI.

When we were with MCI we we had trouble reaching Sprint sites. Now it is
the other way around. Your BBNPlanet reports are not in agreement with
most I have heard either.

There may be some advantages to being "multi-homed" and have a link to a
couple of providers. It also may cause more routing problems. We will be
experiementing with this possible solution of over the next few months.
We will also be obaining a vBNS connection which may help those with
requirements to connect to the high performance computing centers and
other major research locations.

Meanwhile, everybody settle down. You can't change providers like you
change underware. It is pretty confusing out there and things are
changing rapidly.

Bill Willis
Vice Provost for Information Technology
NC State University
Keith Douglas Crawford wrote:
> 
> Well, as a State undergrad and for the time being tech support guy at
> Interpath, I have noticed that some people are plainly more equal than
> others when it comes to providing service.  SPRINT is TERRIBLE.
> 
> The reason that Duke and NCSU (and even UNC-CH, etc) are all getting less
> reliable service is the fact that the people that we get our connectivity
> through (MCNC in thte park) chose the cheaper route.
> 
> There are a number of other options: BBn planet is reported to be pretty
> good, and the engineers at Interpath (which are 5 pay levels up from me)
> are really good as well. Then again, they might not have the capacity to
> support 100 MB/sec links without network upgrades (as is the case
> currently with Interpath).
> Will someone please find a loophole in this contract?
> 

T