It is really tough deciding on an ISP especially when you do not have the luxury of using more then one ISP in a fail-over setup. You often get stuck with the same old local loop provider like SBC was around here which dominated the market.

In the good days we had Speedchoice, a microwave service that was dirt cheap and fast. I like this company still after Sprint bought them out a long time ago. Why do I still like them? Well I was sitting on the Speedchoice stock when the news hit that Sprint made an offer so I am still smiling.

Today looking at hardwire options you have to be pretty selective. I  have many friends in the network engineering sector and they always referred me to XO. Since then I have never looked back. Excellent up-time, throughput, and a great support interface \ staff to close the deal on it.

What else do you expect from someone that owns a  backbone like the one shown in the picture? For one site that I manage they are dealing with an SAP implementation that runs off servers in Germany so we are bringing in a 10mb INET connection from XO. What does that bad boy cost? Around $1,800 a month all bonded up and if your in the network world around here you are paying $400-800 for a single T1. I have to say that is a pretty sick deal for a 10mb connection with other options such as AT&T’s 10mb fiber but by the time they get done trenching the line to your business at $10 a linear foot you have no money left to pay salaries.

Assuming they don’t fall off I will continue to use XO for all of my high speed Internet configurations.

In the Good Business section today we are going to throw some positive feedback out to Cisco Systems. Over the years I have bought enough Cisco equipment to hopefully earn me a few stock options from the board. The only questionable item about Cisco is their stock performance, we all could have hoped for a little more in the bull category!

I have a grave yard of those blue cables some where; you know infamous serial cable that allows you to configure the device right out of the box. I still like the fact that they package it with the correct cable to this day. I have never once received a piece of Cisco equipment that DOA and if I think back really hard over the years I may have had only once piece fail me and that was a Cisco 2600 in a greasy manufacturing environment if my memory serves me correctly.

(more…)