Industry Forums > ISP b2b etc > TWC Fiber - Any Experience?

reply to iansltx

Re: TWC Fiber - Any Experience?

Fair enough. Though around here local peering isn't horrible...it's just in Houston, several ms away. Woul prefer Dallas but you take what you can get. Since it's a total TWC loop sounds like I shouldn't have too many/any problems.

Just curious about the BGP part though; I see RR-RC everywhere and am wondering how different/screwy it is vs. other BGP. Is it because you're an RR-RC, then you connect to TWC's network which is also an RR-RC, which then connects to ADELPHIA-AS most of the time?

Thanks for the info! Though I'm a bit iffy about getting my backbone primarily (and it would be primarily due to the large cost delta) from a potential competitor (by potential I mean if I served any customer in town it'd be at the expense of that customer being a TWC subscriber).

The actual BGP setup is pretty standard. My issue is I have to prepend my AS 2-3 times on it to balance out my Cogent link. It isn't a huge deal, just something to be aware of if your other provider has very aggressive peering.

My AS-path is 20231 (RR WI) to 11955 (RR Kansas City) -> Adelphia/Level3.

As a ISP we haven't had any competitive issues from using TWC. This might be a region-specific thing, but our local TWC people have been fantastic. Now, only 2% or so of our area overlaps with TWC so that might be part of it.
Our local TWC is trying to grow their MetroE based business like mad.

The local business support people are pretty good. If there is a issues they call us about the same time Nagios pages me, within 5 minutes.
For any BGP issues their support people punt to their network engineers. Their network engineers are great. On the rare occasion that we have a routing issue problem I can call up one of their network engineers directly and work it out.

One potential gotcha. We asked for a /24 from them for scratch space and apparently their IP allocations are controlled by a group out east. This group is hostile to ISPs. They wanted full customer info for each IP. If you have ARIN space this won't be a big deal.

Here the AS-PATH shouldn't be too bad; RR-Austin/SA/Houston out to Adelphia/L3. For IPs I'll make sure to look into ARIN ASAP; want to streamline things as much as possible and going through TWC for IPs doesn't sound like the way to do that.

Will have to talk to the TWC fiber custs around here to see what kind of service they're getting. I've heard of outages before, but I'm also thinking of doing some sort of failover/low-weight BGP with another provider (which will be more expensive) to make my service more reliable than their system alone.