>> continued from previous page
Companies Profiled: Genuity | Cogent Communications
Genuity
In the face of up-and-coming metro Ethernet providers, Genuity showed us that its private-line solution provides enterprise customers with the bandwidth they need. Genuity also has experience providing services newer players may not have; the company has existed since 1969, when BBN deployed the original ARPANet. True to its pedigree, Genuity submitted a detailed response, just what we desired.
Right off, Genuity offered service on its network to 13 of our 16 offices, leaving just one office in Dallas and two in New York off the network. That's not too bad, considering that we picked the sites at random. The company proposed OC-12 (622 Mbps) service to headquarters and DS-1 and DS-3 service (1.54 Mbps and 44.7 Mbps, respectively) to the other locations. At each location, Genuity proposed to protect our network with its Enterprise Managed Security (EMS) service, which is based on Check Point Software Technologies and Nokia hardware and software. This service would be monitored around the clock from Genuity's network operations center. And Genuity would help our company create and manage the rule sets and give us monthly reports on policies, VPNs and usage.
Unlike Cogent, which sticks to bandwidth services, Genuity provides optional security and storage-collocation services. To secure the traffic over the public Internet between offices, Genuity recommended the use of its IPsec-compliant VPN. The company's EMS encapsulates private traffic into Genuity's addresses and uses 3DES 56-bit encryption to shield the data.
In its response, Genuity touted its 27 years of security experience to sell us on that service, but stunned us with the price. Good security is expensive and shouldn't be skimped on, but at $48,000 per month, the cost of the security is almost six times that of the connections. Ouch! We hope a lot of fictitious people buy WGF's fictitious games.
Our company also had planned to maintain all source code at a central site when it was not being modified. Genuity proposed mirroring the data from our servers to its own in synchronous or asynchronous mode to one or more storage locations within Genuity's network. We would be guaranteed access to the data, and it would be transmitted securely. We were impressed that Genuity anticipated and addressed this need without our request.
But this option also carries a hefty price tag: an average of $65 per gigabyte of storage per month. With hard drives costing less than $3 per gigabyte, the expense is hard to justify; instead, we could place additional storage at corporate remote sites. While purchasing and maintaining a storage solution or RAID in your company isn't free, the price of equipment and personnel over time should be less expensive. The good news is that Genuity charges only for space used, so you don't have to purchase chunks of storage and hope you use it all. The monthly management fees of $60,000-plus might also discourage WGF from storing the data with Genuity.
We asked about "big brother" services to monitor our employees' productivity and were glad Genuity doesn't offer any. The vendor can provide QoS (Quality of Service) services to route our security camera video back to the corporate location but wanted nothing to do with installing and maintaining a video-surveillance system.
When we requested IP telephony, Genuity showed its GTE roots, suggesting its Black Rocket Voice service. BRV allows integration of existing PBX or IP PBX systems into Genuity's network. For those enterprise customers that need new IP phones and software, Genuity can set them up with its partners, Cisco Systems and Verizon. On-net calls between offices would be free, except for the bandwidth being used. Off-net calls would be discounted to our company at the rate of $0.0275 per minute, based on the number of employees and expected number of calls per employee. Genuity's proposal broke down to around $75 per employee per month. This figure was based on 1,200 minutes per employee for off-net calls. No wonder our fictitious company doesn't get any work done: The employees spend 20 hours on the phone each month.
Genuity estimated circuit availability within 40 days, with installation of the security and VPN 30 business days after that. Cogent offers a similar turnaround time, though if your business is in a lit building, you need only an Ethernet connection from the demarcation point to your office, which can be accomplished much quicker than ordering circuits from a local carrier or competitive local exchange carrier. Genuity said it would work with WGF to provide a seamless transition plan to minimize downtime from our old provider and offered to work with us in planning the new network to make sure it met our needs before it was implemented.
For statistics, Genuity provides a Web interface to its Stats Advantage service, which lets customers create and view stats on utilization, dropped packets and error rate of the network. The data can be downloaded in a detailed tabular format for use in your favorite spreadsheet application. Bidirectional data is collected so that both transmits and receives from a location can be monitored in maximum, minimum, average or 95th percentile format. All data is available for up to six months.
Genuity has changed the service-level moniker from agreement to guarantee, hence its term, SLG. The SLGs are impressive, with uptime guaranteed at no less than 99.97 percent. That's no more than 13 minutes of downtime a month. Any network outage lasting between 10 and 60 minutes is remunerated as a one-day credit. Average latency is guaranteed not to exceed 55 milliseconds on the network, with packet loss limited to 0.5 percent. A maximum of 15 days can be credited for any given month's service. Half a month free isn't a bad deal, but the customer must request the credit. We've harped on this topic before: If an outage is known to be the provider's fault, the customer's account should be credited without customer action.
Genuity, (781) 865-2000, (800) GENUITY; www.genuity.com
Cogent Communications
Cogent Communications is worlds apart from Genuity, even in its availability. Whereas Genuity could deliver to 13 of our 16 locations, Cogent could deliver only to three. The three buildings that are lit by Cogent are in the downtown areas of Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco. This, unfortunately, is typical of the current metro Ethernet market. Many cities--and even locations within a city--can't be connected. This will change, but it will take time for more fiber to be brought into buildings and for the market to open and allow access to fiber that exists within a building. Cogent is trying to make bandwidth a commodity product, which would be great for the enterprise world, but more time is needed for metro players to prove themselves.
Cogent's pricing appears to be a model of simplicity; there's no need to memorize complicated formulas or figure out how far a location is from a central office. All you have to do is remember $1,000 per 100 megabits of bandwidth. But there are countless variations on this simple model.
First, for WGF's request, Cogent hit the main sites with an extra $3,000 per month because our fictitious company provided online services to end users. This fee took us by surprise, as we thought separate pricing for service providers had gone away. Also, our company wasn't reselling the service, so we don't understand Cogent's policy. We also learned the corporate headquarters' 300-Mbps bandwidth was going to cost an additional $10,000 per month because it would require a gigabit connection to deliver it. This also seems odd, given that the building--Chicago's Sears Tower--is lit. Surely, Cogent could find a few other customers to take on the 700 Mbps we weren't going to use. Cogent cited the cost of deploying additional fiber on top of what it uses to justify the fee.
Cogent says the bandwidth it offers is not oversubscribed but rather real, available bandwidth. Cogent's drawbacks, however, are its limited geographic availability and its hands-off approach. Cogent provides bandwidth only. In other words, "Here's your Ethernet connection. Plug it into your equipment and have fun." Any security-related VPN or IPsec services are up to you to provide. Although this cuts down on Cogent's overhead, you need to be sure you know what you're doing, as you won't get much hand-holding.
On the SLA front, Cogent offers 99.99 percent uptime. (That's just a squitch over four minutes of downtime per month.) However, the company failed to detail its SLA policies further. By using ring topologies for its network, the loss of data due to a fiber cut is dramatically reduced, since the network will automatically turn the data around the other direction in less than a second to reach its destination. The ring network extends all the way to the building, so even a cut in the "last mile" shouldn't affect data reliability. The rest of the network will remain up, even if it can't communicate with the building. Cogent advertises approximately 0 percent packet loss on its network, which is great, but the latency is a little on the high side at 75 ms.
Cogent Communications, (202) 295-4200, (877) 875-4432; www.cogentco.com
Darrin Woods is a technology editor of Network Computing. Darrin has worked as a WAN engineer for a telecom carrier. Send your comments on this article to him at dwoods@nwc.com.
REPORTS
ANALYTICS
Follow 
