Company MPLS and internet breakout

nutcase

nutcase

nutcase

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
7,622
Location
SX, unfortunately
Somehow I've been tasked with getting prices to replace our company MPLS supplier. The current one was bought out a couple of years ago by a venture capitalist lost and the customer service we have has gone from okish to pathetic.

We have a head office (50 desks) where the servers are located and is the hub of the spoked mpls network. It also has the gateway. It is connected via a 10mbit fibre with ADSL backup. We use about 40% of the capacity on average, with peak demand up to the full 10 (the internet is shared on that connection).

An almost adjacent lab with 10 seats. This is connected to the head office via wireless link with ADSL backup. This site also houses a backup server for DR purposes.

There are 5 regional offices, all but one have EFM connections of either 2, 3 or 4mbit with ADSL backup. One site has dual ADSL. Each of these sites has 10-15 seats.

So, I have 2 main contenders at the moment who have done proposals. And I was quite surprised - they are very different.

One has specced a 10/100 fibre to head office, a 6DRmbit EFM to the lab the idea being that the EFM is the failover and allows us to use the lab as a more robust DR site. The regionals all have been specced a 4mbit EFM with ADSL backup except one which has a 4/10 fibre as EFM there isn't capable of 4mbit. They've specced Cisco 1921 routers throughout, and a 10mbit CGSS internet breakout in one of their datacentres.

The second has specced 10/100 fibre to all the offices, including the lab with ADSL backup throughout. They've specced dual cisco 1941s for head office/lab and cisco 1941 with 887 backup routers for the regionals. A 20mbit CGSS in one of their datacentres for internet breakout.

The difference in cost over a 3 year contract is nearly double :eek: I've requested pricing for EFMs where possible for the second one, but they say they don't use talktalk business for EFM because of supplier issues. I know their residential is crud, but is their business that bad as well?

We can afford for one or so of the regionals to be offline for a day, but not head office. The firsts offers a 9 hour connection restoration for EFM, the second 3 days. Really not sure what to do - was expecting similar products. Part of the cost is also the dual routers over single for the regionals - an unnecessary expense? We don't mind spending a bit more for a better solution, but double?!

Does anyone have any thoughts on the two solutions offered?

Fanks :)
 
I'm getting 4 prices total -

Entanet
Claranet
Vodafone
Spitfire

Still waiting for the solutions form Vodafone and Spitfire.
 
Just found this thread in my subscribed threads. Apologies for not keeping it a but more updated!

So for completeness:

Vodafone - rejected for having an overkill proposal.
Spitfire - rejected for thinking a single side of A4 was sufficient information for a contract worth over £100k for the 3 year life!

Both Entanet and Claranet provided good quality proposals (Claranet agreed to use EFMs instead of fibre throughout). Main difference was Claranet proposed dual routers vs. Entanet's single (we upgraded to dual for head office). After much debate and to-ing and fro-ing we elected to go for Entanet, which went live in November 2013.

Issues -

Their sales rep left without telling us and so we wondered why our emails weren't getting responded too - they weren't getting forwarded either. Didn't fill us with confidence.
They use sonicwall firewalls which we discovered the hard way DON'T play nicely with IP phones. Took some bodging to get round that.
Minor things like we ordered rack ears for a couple of the routers but the forgot to send them.

We've had 1 outage for ne of the Scottish offices - a rat chewed through a bunch of cables and took our 3/4 of the whole town so both primary and secondary connections went offline. Not enta's fault and we were back on a couple of hours later.

So 12 months in we're reasonably happy.
 
Can I ask is it Claranet or Star(now Claranet)?

I've worked with several companies where we have put star mpls in and have a good relationship with them, but there transition over to Claranet since the buyout has left some questioning... Like what you mention reps and staff changes are unannounced or unplanned and the clients are worried or unsettled by changes.

Claranet speed wise I can't fault...there Internet breakouts from the mpls are great
 
welshboy said:
Can I ask is it Claranet or Star(now Claranet)?

I've worked with several companies where we have put star mpls in and have a good relationship with them, but there transition over to Claranet since the buyout has left some questioning... Like what you mention reps and staff changes are unannounced or unplanned and the clients are worried or unsettled by changes.

Claranet speed wise I can't fault...there Internet breakouts from the mpls are great
Click to expand...

It was Claranet. they "merged" with star during the process.
 
welshboy said:
Can I ask is it Claranet or Star(now Claranet)?

I've worked with several companies where we have put star mpls in and have a good relationship with them, but there transition over to Claranet since the buyout has left some questioning... Like what you mention reps and staff changes are unannounced or unplanned and the clients are worried or unsettled by changes.

Claranet speed wise I can't fault...there Internet breakouts from the mpls are great
Click to expand...

I work for Claranet and we've acuqired star. :mad:
 
Last edited:
We've started the process of moving away from Enta - their network has been VERY reliable, with only two issues over the period - rats chewed through a major connection which took out the entire town we had an office with, and TalkTalk allowing their circuits to have massive packetloss during an England game earlier this year - apparently they had the contract to stream it?

However, the customer service is what has causes us to move. Very very frustrating at times and they've never managed to get a VoIP system to be stable. So we're moving to our current VoIP supplier's network. I've been much less involved with this so I can't be blamed if it all goes wrong :D
 
We use different providers to different POP's to provide redundancy on MPLS links (usually load balanced). As an overall provider we use Verizon in EMEA.
 
I'd be surprised if Verizon would be interested in a tender for that network - it's too small for them. They could barely be bothered to invest time in a tender for my network and that was about 15x (based on cost alone) of the OP's network.
 
It was just an example, an overall provider with two sub suppliers to different POP's providing some redundancy.
 
Unfortunately with out office locations being in "budget" areas, POPs are few and far between so all we can do is supplier diversity.
 
Forgot I'd updated this thread that we were moving again. Been a bit of a mare - a paperwork cockup (long story, no-one accepting blame) meant that the old MPLS ended up being cancelled 2 months before the new one was ready and despite offering cash a plenty Enta refused to extend the supply. So we ended up running dual FTTC to each office for the time being with them using a VPN connection to head office. NOT ideal. New MPLS *should* finally be going live tomorrow. I don't have much confidence of it going smoothly...
 
So apparently testing the port forwards will work isn't part of the MPLS setup testing. Slightly frustrating!
 
The fun and games of switching provider!

I'm going to have to go out to tender next year, I'm thorough fed up of our current vendor. They're not fixing their issues so I don't want to give them the revenue any longer.
 
I didn't want to change but the phone provider offered a significant saving... Now we're getting reverse DNS errors when sending some emails. Need it like a hole in the head :(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom