[AusNOG] Primus BGP support

[Skeeve Stevens]

Absolutely true.... not many are as lucky as us to have love from you Matt
;-) (who btw is one of the best people at Soul who is actually fun to talk
to).

...Skeeve

-----Original Message-----
From: Mathew Cameron [mailto:mathew.cameron at soulaustralia.com.au] 
Sent: Sunday, 2 November 2008 8:17 AM
To: Sean K. Finn; skeeve at skeeve.org; Campbell, Alex; ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: RE: [AusNOG] Primus BGP support


I would have to say go with the escalation process and when/if necessary use
it taking down as much info as possible regarding the problem simply b/c as
you go up the chain the more detailed info you'll need. The other way is to
build a good business relationship with an Engineer who makes him/herself
freely available....This has always worked for one of your more active
posters ;o). Processes only go so far. Good relationships will always get
you a result.

-----Original Message-----
From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net on behalf of Sean K. Finn
Sent: Sun 11/2/2008 2:22 AM
To: 'skeeve at skeeve.org'; 'Campbell, Alex'; 'ausnog at ausnog.net'
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Primus BGP support
 
Then ringing and politely checking every 15 minutes to  'see how they are
going' with an issue when it's obvious they are trying to ignore it helps
too.

-S

From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net
[mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Skeeve Stevens
Sent: Sunday, 2 November 2008 12:54 AM
To: 'Campbell, Alex'; ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Primus BGP support

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