RSSLevel 3 Network Falters Overnight
By Ed Oswald | Published October 21, 2005, 1:28 PM
Level 3 Communications experienced what it called "widespread network instability" early Friday, causing problems for numerous ISPs and hosts that depend on Level 3 to serve traffic. According to posts on the NANOG mailing list, the issue may have centered on faulty maintenance in one of the Internet backbone's service centers.
The outage began at roughly 2AM ET, and lasted for several hours. Some reported problems with their connections up to seven hours after the initial failure. Level 3, which is one of the largest providers of Internet service in the country, offers dial-up and broadband at wholesale prices to its customers. Level 3 was most recently in the news for its spat with competitor Cogent over network traffic.
Ouch!
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Level 3 is the AOL of ISP backbones.
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Wait...Level3 is so easy to use my Grandma could set up an ISP through them?
Wow... They need to market that ability, they'd make Millions!
Do you have any clue what your talking about?
Do you know what level3 does? Do you know why they de-peered Cogent last week? Do you know that L3 warned all of it's customers weeks in advance and gave Cogent the time to do the same? Did you know Cogent decided not to inform their customers?
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I think he was referring to their size. As to the truth of his statement though, I couldn't say.
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The ISP I work for relies on Level 3 for 90% of its dialup customers. I'll bet tech support was having a fun time this morning =p.
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How big are you guys? I'd consider becoming "multi-homed" with redundant connections to multiple Tier1 service providers.
Say you have 2 lines from Level3, I'd drop one when your contract is up and get the second from another provider.
That would hopefully allay any future concerns about Tier1 companies de-peering or installing faulty upgrades.
of course, for smaller ISPs, this is simply not going to be affordable, and as such, they may suffer in the future as Level 3 is going to de-peer Cogent again within the next few weeks.
The de-peering, by the way, has been done before to Cogent, by France Telecom,
Sprint, and AOL in turn. Cogent's bullying and subsequent problems with peering partners is far from unheard of.
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Yeah, they're not that big.
But something like this hasn't happened before (that I can remember) at the fault of Level3.
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