[AusNOG] Primus BGP support

[Skeeve Stevens]

Their response is certainly not reasonable.. But you will find it the case a
lot of the time.

 

I've had BGP issues with several carriers on the weekends and late at night,
and it has always been a nightmare getting them to escalate to someone who
has a clue with BGP to look at the issues.. Most of the time the 'NOC' staff
don't even know what BGP is much less able to fix it.

 

It is probably too much to expect the people answering the phones to be know
BGP, but they should understand the concepts of their network, and they
should be able to escalate the ticket to someone who actually knows what to
do - or who to call.  I find that 'hyping' the outage in these cases helps.
tell them it is a critical outage involving some large number, or important
end customer or some such.  works most of the time.  When that fails I ask
for their escalation contacts and start calling account managers mobiles and
other people I can annoy who know how to else to annoy.

 

Does your contract talk about their SLA's?  I find that most SLA's are
severely lacking and rarely detail their NOC's response and actions. 

 

If the sales guy said that then there has been a breach of verbal contract -
but you'd have fun fighting that.  Go up the line.. Not that it helps
sometimes. try talking to Soul. they're TPG's bitch now and barely have any
ability to get things done with their upstream network.  Last BGP issue I
had with Soul took a huge effort by the Soul people to get the TPG phone
monkey to even wake up the on-call engineer - and that took hours.  Soul
sales guys have been nice, but in the end, it's a signed deal and they don't
really care that much - but Soul has been like that for a while.. I think
they sold theirs..  a long time ago ;-)

 

With Primus. I'd pressure them. raise it as an outage. if you aren't getting
the right feed or something like that, then I would consider it an outage,
as these kinds of things can have cost implications as well as cause
degraded services.  Demand they escalate - get as high as you can and anyone
who won't help you, escalate again if possible and remind them they are in
breach of their support agreements. usually works.  Then talk to the sales
people and get the situation fixed if you can. otherwise, buy elsewhere and
let everyone know how you were treated.  If Soul only knew how many hundreds
of thousands (if not millions) of dollars of revenue and flow on business
they have lost because of their extremely slack technical and sales support.

 

.Skeeve

 

 

--

Skeeve Stevens, CEO

eintellego Pty Ltd - The Networking Specialists

skeeve at eintellego.net / www.eintellego.net

Phone: (+61) 1300 753 383, Fax: (+612) 8572 9954

Cell +61 (0)414 753 383 / skype://skeeve

--

NOC, NOC, who's there?

 

 

 

From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net
[mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Campbell, Alex
Sent: Saturday, 1 November 2008 11:39 PM
To: ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: [AusNOG] Primus BGP support

 

Hi all,

 

We have recently started buying transit from Primus in their Melbourne DC.
We have come across a BGP issue with their service and their NOC is telling
us that they only do BGP support 9am-5pm Monday-Friday.  I guess they figure
that BGP issues are very friendly and usually only arise during business
hours.

 

This is especially frustrating since I actually asked their business
development manager during the sales process "does Primus have a 24x7 NOC we
can contact, staffed by engineers capable of troubleshooting BGP issues etc"
and he said yes.

 

Has anyone else had similar experiences with Primus?  Does this seem
reasonable?

 

Cheers,

 

Alex 

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