On Sun, 16 Jan 2005, Erik Anderson wrote: > As long as we're discussing bandwidth/price stuff, at work, we've been > using a frac DS3 10-Mbit full duplex link from TW. We've been paying > about $1300/month for it, well last week, we got a note from a TW > salesperson offerring us our same service at $750. Not bad, huh? One > other nice thing is that they take care of the media conversion, so we > just plugged their RJ45 ethernet line directly into our router. We got our TWT frac DS-3 a couple of years ago and pricing was good then (it was especially good on full DS-3 commits). It was only a few months after we bought the two PA-2T3+ cards and smartnet that they announced their metro-area ethernet offering (so, after we dropped a bunch of money in DS-3 hardware...). Pricing for the same speed service over MAE rather than DS-3 was considerably cheaper, as you can see, the hardware was cheaper, and the product seems to be just as good. In fact, I setup a FreeBSD based router for a friend/webhost that had 10M to TW. A cheap intel box, a handful of 100M NICs and a quick install and config of Zebra, and they had "hot router love" - a poor man's internet router taking full routes from 2 providers. Performed flawlessly. And they didn't have to drop $700 on 128M cisco-certified DIMMs. I had a partial DS-3, a friend of mine runs a local ISP/hosting provider and has 200M to them, yet another friend at another hosting company has 10M ethernet to them. All of us have found them to be reliable, and support to be first-rate. I would highly recommend TWT to anyone looking for big pipe in the cities, especially if you're in the 494 or downtown areas where the fiber build is economical. As above, get their well-priced metro ethernet service and throw together a cheap Linux box as a router. I thought RT had turned up a TWT connection (in fact, I remember spouting off to Nate how great they were...), but I don't see 4323 in their path list. The only thing I wish they had was a better BGP community system. They supported NOEXPORT and NOADVERTISE, but I would've liked a way to control things like local pref, peer AS prepending, etc. using communities. _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list