Advice about Qwest, Cogent, and Equinix facilities

[davet1 at gmail.com (Dave Temkin)]

Completely agreed; in many situations even if one of those carrier 
locked data centers allow another carrier in, they may severely limit 
the portfolio of services that are allowed to be offered by them.

For example, one of the vendors listed below only allows "lit" 
crossconnects from 3rd party carriers and only from a demarc that they 
specify, generally not within the same data center that you're housed.  
It means that any type of circuit that you drop into there is 
effectively type 2.  It's ugly.

-Dave

William Herrin wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Jeffrey Negro <jnegro at billtrust.com> wrote:
>   
>> My company is planning on implementing a new strategy for our web
>> application deployment. [...] I would welcome any advice or
>> experiences other nanog members may have with regards to these
>> providers, as well as any suggestions about other providers that may fit
>> the bill.
>>     
>
> Two words: carrier neutral.
>
> With a carrier neutral facility like Equinix you'll have a greater
> wealth of data services available to you from a wide range of carriers
> at on-net prices. And alternatives available when one of those
> services doesn't pan out quite what the salesman claimed.
>
> With a particular carrier's facility such as Verizon, Qwest, Level3 or
> Cogent, you're more limited. Other carriers occasionally vend some
> services there but the variety is generally very limited and they tend
> to be much more expensive than the incumbent.
>
> And God help you when you want to leave... The DNC moved out of the
> Verizon Business data center in Ashburn VA in 2006 and tried to buy a
> Verizon Business line at another data center in order to keep the IP
> addresses. Verizon Business refused to move the IP address blocks to a
> VB line outside of the data center. With a carrier neutral facility,
> the carriers have no vested interest in keeping you in that particular
> data center.
>
> Regards,
> Bill Herrin
>
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