Level 3 - "legacy" Wiltel/Looking Glass bandwidth

[streiner at cluebyfour.org (Justin M. Streiner)]

On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Justin Shore wrote:

> Every time we tried to take this position we got the same old line of
> "we've got everything in the path configured correctly; you'll get the 
> full 200Mbps" to which I'd reply with a reminder that we got the same
> assurance when we turned up the 100Mbps with them a year prior only to 
> later discover a cap of around 50Mbps somewhere in the middle.  Our 
> account team's hands are tied.  There isn't anything that they can do 
> about it.  I've got it documented in email so if we suddenly flatline 
> again at some percentage under 100% we'll raise an unholy hell with them.

I ran into similar problems with Verizon on a long-haul EPL circuit a few 
years ago.  Speed problems were aggravated by the fact that this 
was still a very new service for them, so almost none of their NCC 
folks were trained in provisioning or troubleshooting them.  Assuming that 
L3 provisions circuits like this over a SONET transport, then they're 
basically bonding four STS-1s into a 200 meg logical pipe.  If the 
bonding and mapping isn't done properly all the way through the system, 
including the end terminals where the Ethernet <-> SONET conversions 
happen, then you don't get the full bandwidth.  You might also see other 
odd side effects like unexplainable jitter, occasional retransmits, or 
other throughput killers.

jms