Geekwhore.net - Pimpin’ since ‘02

So we just turned up our second DS-3 a few weeks ago. Overall I’ve been pretty happy, dual DS-3’s, slowly tweaking BGP, life is pretty happy. However, I noticed as we turned up the second DS-3 that the next logical step is an OC-3 and then I got to thinking how stupid it is to have to deal with circuits in this day and age. The landscape is changing but it can’t get here soon enough. Why can every other piece of equipment on my network work at ethernet speeds (10 Meg, 100 Meg, 1000 Meg…etc), yet when I go to connect to the internet I have to buy it in stupid increments of 45 Meg, 155 Meg…etc. As an ISP we like to wait until the last minute to buy more internet bandwidth, not because we like to cut it close but because it makes no sense to buy a 45 meg pipe that you are only going to use 10 meg’s on. Unfortunately we are forced to because it takes so long to get the connections installed and in place (the most recent DS-3 that we just put in took over 6 months for the RBOC to get installed!!!!). Life will be much simpler when I can go out and simply purchase bandwidth in 5 or 10 meg increments. So I call the RBOC(or whomever I’m buying my bandwidth from), they deliver the piece of fiber that goes up to 1 Gig and then we rate shape the connection to whatever I need. If I only need 5 meg’s that’s fine..charge me for 5 meg’s and the loop, if I need 500 Meg’s then so be it. Also, when you do this, I want to be able to have multiple VLAN’s/MPLS circuits running across it. So if I want 200 Meg’s of internet and then I want 100 Meg’s for a point to point connection then so be it. We currently work with a company that does just this. It’s great, other providers are getting there…unfortunately it’s just not the providers that I have to work with most of the time.