[AusNOG] PIPE Networks Intercap - The truth

[Bevan Slattery]

Dear 'noger's,

Sorry to push this post out, however I thought I needed to get some
honesty in the market with respect to our Intercap product.  We've heard
from a number of customers that 2 of our competitors have 'canned' our
intercap product.  I suspect this is because we've introduced a new
price point for Intercap in the Australian marketplace and frankly
they're not enjoying the margins they used to.

Apparently the basis of their attack is that 'to offer it that cheap it
has to be contended and 'poor' quality intercapital capacity.  This is
in spite of one parties continual network issues on exactly the same
product over the past 2 months.

The way PIPE works is that when we want/need a product we go to market
to find the best possible solution and the best possible price.  We went
to market for some intercap for our internal needs (we have quite a
staff interstate now with MS File/Print/Exchange/VoIP/Asterisk/etc..  We
also wanted to create  single VLAN for our PVX product to people can
exchange VoIP minutes across a single fabric.  So the pricing we went
for was 10Mb/s, 50Mb/s, 100Mb/s.  Let's just say the pricing was
uninspiring.  During a conversation with one of the respondents which is
a carrier we have a good relationship with (one that owns a single path
fibre network between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne) they explained
they were looking at buying a diverse wavelength from another carrier.
The price for the wavelength was high, yet on a unit price it was good.
We thought invest the money and sell off the spare capacity to other
providers who would appreciate the access to better pricing.  So PIPE
agreed that we would 'fund' that parties purchase of the wavelength.  In
exchange they gave us almost half the wavelength capacity on their fibre
and the same capacity on the other carriers wavelength.  It was agreed
that unlike most other intercap circuits, we would get 2 absolute
diverse high capacity Ethernet over SDH service between the capital
cities and would avoid their MPLS network.

So what we have is two diverse 1Gb/s EoSDH circuits between
Brisbane-Sydney and Sydney-Melbourne.  Our capacity literally goes from
their intercap DWDM equipment to their SDH to Ethernet switch and
straight to us from their PoP's on our fibre  .This terminates on our
redundant and physically separate Foundry MLX infrastructure.  I'm not
saying our Intercap product is better than anyone elses, I'll let our
customers make that judgement (which they have).  I actually find it
quite funny that the companies making these comments were the one's we
didn't buy from because their pricing was too high and/or solution was
technically inferior.

If anyone hears these comments from the 'other' carriers then please
take pity on these poor souls for they know not what they say.  I
suspect the bleeting you hear is from a salesperson who is probably
about to miss their quarterly target :)  If you need to hear the true
story, talk to our sales staff who will set you straight or if you're
from the geek side of things, talk to our Network people who will really
give it to you :)

Cheers

[b]

PS:  Intercap network running at 8% of capacity...