post house telecommunications questions

[marty lester]

hey post team-

our studio is considering switching our telecom provider to XO communications.
i have been asked by the bosses to see if anyone has any real-world experience
with XO.

they would be our phone and internet provider. i won't bore you with
the details of the package, but it would be pretty powerful as far
as bandwidth.

to keep it Protools related, i'll say that with the upgrade in bandwidth
over our current DSL hook-up, we may be able to run Source Connect
with reliable results. also, we'll be able to do file xfers much quicker
than with our regular business DSL service that we have (it's asynchronus...
slower up than down if you take my meaning).

in summary, anyone have any good/bad things to say about XO Communications?

sorry if this strays too far off-topic for a Protools user group, but i love
having you post-pros out there to lean on...

thanks,
marty

[Jimmix]

I used XO service at post house in chicago. I found that most of XO's traffic went through texas and there are were bottlenecks (excessive latency and jitter) on their own network (xo to xo peer to peer chicago to california traffic) XO is a tier two provider and they are not a tier one provider.

All tier one providers openly peer directly with other tier one providers and it is a very exclusive group. Tier two providers must pay for their peering with each individual tier one provider so they may not have as many peers and their peering arrangement may not be good ones. The goal with peer to peer trafic is to keep it on the same provider for as long as possible.

There are logical reason that going with a tier one provider makes the most sense and there are logical reasons why a tier two provider makes more sense (I'm not sure I agree though). In general I think a strong and true tier one provider will give the best results especially with peer to peer trafic because it will most likely result in the fewest peer hops to where you are going. You should note that some tier two providers claim to be tier one providers. Tier one providers are AT&T, Sprint, MCI, Level 1, and a few others.

This is a tough issue because of yearly contracts and the inability to really know what level of service you are really getting. in general internet service providers will blame their peers for poor speeds and will only guarantee the local loop's performance. Bandwidth, Jitter and latency should all be part of the SLA (service level agreement) and for real time applications latency and jitter are more important than total bandwidth.

Also using phone and internet on the same service line requires putting in place specific QoS rules on your router to make sure that the different types of traffic (phone, ftp, email and peer to peer) conflict as little as possible.

My 2 dollars worth

JIm

[marty lester]

jim-

much appreciated! we're doing a 90 day trial with them, so i'll
report back if my feeble brain remembers.

thanks again,
marty.