1

Today has been hell… AGAIN! Our MPLS went down at 8:30am. We hear it’s a fiber cut and then ask where the hell is our redundency in their cloud? They say “Oh yea, that should have rerouted traffic.”

Well there you go. I’m reminded of a saying the involves a monkey and a football. I cant wait to make a change in less than a year and move on from this stress.

14 Spice ups
2

I should add that we came back up at about 1PM so I guess they rerouted us because I doubt the fiber was fixed that quick. We have since dropped out 4 times for about 30 seconds so things aren’t fixed yet.

3

Damn, keep fighting the good fight though.

4

If i was you I would be on the phone trying to get some $ back on your contract since you are probably paying extra from redundancy right? well how many months have you been paying for a service you obviously were not getting…

1 Spice up
5

Months? Try years… One year left on our already shortened contract and we may get it shortened again after the bosses raise some hell about today. It makes me cry when I hear how much we are paying for this crap.

6

We had WS as our ISP at our 2 locations already. I had a turn up day to install services at a new CoLo. On that day I tried calling into WS tech support to turn up service at the new location. I waited 1:45 on hold and finally just gave up. Called sales guy and he said he would get back to me ASAP. This was on a Friday. I finally got a hold of the sales guy Monday after 10:00 AM as he was “busy in a meeting and was unavailable for my call”. I called the NOC and found out he turned the order in wrong and it would take 30 days to get a new order through. He turned the order in for just MPLS and no DIA. I setup a meeting with my CEO, him, his regional sales manager and I. The sales manager came into the meeting thinking he was going to run the show. My CEO and I quickly corrected him on this. Right before the meeting I did a quick search on Spiceworks to see if others had issues with them. I printed out 15 pages of bad reviews from Spiceworks and had them ready for him. When he said how great Windstream was I quickly showed him what we had to say. He left our office in tears. As soon as we had fiber ran into all of our locations I canceled services per the SLA.

4 Spice ups
7

Ouch.

Yeah.

Fire them.

Out a cannon.

At a brick wall.

in shark infested water.

.

.

.

Ok just whimper and hope it gets better soon.

1 Spice up
8

I feel your pain. Fortunately I no longer work for a wind stream customer. I’m afraid the only fix is going elsewere.

1 Spice up
9

We are researching and getting pricing on replacements so in one year (or less) we should be clear of these guys.

1 Spice up
10

Our service finally came back about midnight. There was a fibre break near Appleton and affected a lot of carriers. Of course it was an ATT issue so all the local companies that use the backbone were down.

11

And I get the Windstream cant do anything about a fiber cut. Our issue is why isnt there another pathway? They seemed to think that there should be another path but it didnt fail over or reroute. We came up around 1PM yet an email states that… “A 3,000 foot span of fiber was repaired as of approximately 11 PM EST 10/1. Services are restored at this time to normal operation.” …so that makes me think that they got us to fail over which should have happened automatically.

We will see what todays discussions hold.

12

Definitely can help you research other options. We are a telecommunications master agency partnered with over 100 carriers with better than direct pricing - and more importantly, a foothold into all the carriers for additional levels of escalations and support (with volume business comes some extra special treatment - and always nice to have some 3rd party muscle in your corner when the sh*t hits the fan).

MPLS is our wheelhouse and there are some significantly better options out there when it comes to building in automated working redundancy. Depending on the locations and the number of sites, full MPLS migrations can take 6 months+ so I am glad to see you are starting the process early. And if you can get out sooner, even better.

PM me if you want to get a complete look at the landscape from a pricing and performance perspective. You can also check us out here: www.commquotes.com . We help SpiceHeads with carrier migrations every single day.

13

We’ve had Windstream for various services at roughly 6 of our 12+ locations for the past several years.

While i won’t say they are the most reliable service provider on the planet, I’ve certainly experienced much much worse (ONE communications\Earthlink).

We’ve learned to take these outages in stride by utilizing cheaper and more diversified offerings.

While we do use some heavy T1 lines to interconnect out largest offices, All of our offices use a combination of business class DSL\Cable services from 2 or more carriers along-side the big pipes where the big pipes are even needed.

To concentrate and failover these individual lines from multiple carriers into a single Bonded connection, we use old desktop hardware with some extra NICs running Zeroshell (a Linux based FOSS routing distro).

It’s been a lifesaver for us. Not to mention cheap\free to implement.

14

This would make a great YouTube video.