[asterisk-biz] DID outages statistics across USA? Which providers have a solid track record and which don't?

[Alex Balashov]

Bruce,

On 10/21/2011 11:19 AM, Bruce B wrote:

> For those of solely relying on DID from a VoIP provider, can you
> provide me some info for the last two years as to which provider had
> no interruptions in service at all and which ones had 3 or less?
>
> I am currently dealing with Vitelity and if I am not wrong they get
> service from XO Communication who in turn has had multiple outages in
> the past few years.

Unfortunately, your question is somewhat unanswerable, as currently 
posed.  But to illuminate why, some exposition of where DIDs come from 
is necessary.

Feeding much of the top of this supply chain are several first-tier 
nationwide CLECs such as Level3, XO, and GX.  Because they are 
interconnected as CLECs in every or almost every LATA, they have the 
ability to offer origination and termination in virtually any first or 
second-tier US market, although they certainly specialise differently. 
  GX and XO mostly deal only in very urban markets, whereas Level3 
famously has a famously large origination footprint, as a vestige of 
its managed modem access network.  They also get direct end-office 
trunking out of every end-office in which they have codes, including 
many end-offices we would consider firmly second tier.

They are somewhat oligopolic from a strictly urban point of view, but 
they also specialise in somewhat different markets outside of "NFL 
cities".  This is reflected in their pricing.

The second rung in this hierarchy are hybrid aggregators such as 
Broadvox and Bandwidth.com.  Both of these companies started out as 
resellers of aforementioned Tier 1 origination/termination, and to a 
large extent, that's still what they do.  However, they have started 
building out their own CLEC in certain high-volume metro markets. 
When they give you "on-net" pricing, that's what they mean;  it's part 
of their interconnected CLEC holdings.  Bandwidth.com in particular 
used to be a pure Level3 resale play, but has become a CLEC in certain 
markets to turned up its own switching capacity.  The general tendency 
is for these entities to grow their CLECs and take more stuff on-net, 
but only in very select, high-volume and high-growth metro markets 
where the cost and overhead of being a CLEC makes sense for their 
gross margins.

The other thing these middle players do is strike a lot of direct 
access relationships with local and regional LECs, although in dense 
metro markets, it's usually just more economical to go through one of 
the big CLECs because of the volumes at which they're buying from them 
anyway.

The traditional distributive function that these guys played with 
respect to their resale of the majors was that the latter required 
very high commitments, but with progress and the economic situation 
being what it is, they've become a lot better at delivering somewhat 
smaller transactions.  However, the second rung retains a significant 
pricing advantage even when selling you Level3 routes, say, because of 
the volumes at which they're buying from someone like Level3.  They 
also have cost advantage in certain markets that comes from direct 
local access relationships with smaller CLECs and some rural LECs.

The important thing to understand is that all these guys are densely 
peered and sell each other's routes and origination to you.  They will 
deliver what they can on-net, and procure the rest elsewhere. 
Sometimes their pricing is transparent about that, sometimes it's not, 
but that's what they do.  Origination and termination are subject to a 
great deal of aggregation and resale.  In a way, it's almost like debt 
instruments.

Physically, the network architectures of both the first and second 
category operators vary a great deal.  Some of them have highly 
distributed topologies that keep most failures rather localised or 
regionalised, while others have very edges and backhaul traffic to 
relatively centralised core routing network elements.  There is an 
entire continuum of technical and economic tradeoffs in these design 
variations.

Importantly, all of them have outages.  Every one of them.  That's 
normal and unavoidable.  Even if their own gear were 100% perfect, a 
million things can go wrong on the counterparty side of a CLEC, say. 
Tandem trunk exhaust, POI problems, backhoe, slow LERG updates for 
CLEC homing info on the part of ILECs and wireless majors, etc. 
That's all par for the course.  And of course, they can't much control 
what happens off-net, which still accounts for a great deal of what 
they have to sell you if you're buying nationwide footprint.

In the case of a CLEC, the fundamental unit of physical 
interconnection is the LATA, so at the very least, you need to 
parameterise your question with a locale.  It's rather unintelligible 
to talk about an entity interconnected in almost every LATA in 
holistic terms.  Somewhere, in some rate center, XO is probably having 
an outage right now -- that doesn't make them unreliable.  The 
question is whether it's in your rate center(s), how often it's in 
your rate center(s), and whether it's for reasons that are genuinely 
avoidable, especially by them.

The next rung are pure wholesale and retail ITSPs that have no carrier 
facility of their own;  they just buy from the first and second 
constituencies.  The general problem, to which a great deal of 
discussion on this list is devoted, is the enormous variation in 
quality among service providers that fit into this category.  It is 
often--though by no means necessarily--that their infrastructure is 
the weakest link in what you ultimately buy.

There is a lot of aggregation and blending that happens at this level, 
too.  An ITSP as large as Vitelity almost certainly procures 
origination from multiple sources in order to maximise reach.  It's 
highly unlikely to be as simple as "Vitelity uses XO", although, it is 
common enough to have a preponderant origination partner in order to 
simplify, streamline and homogenise management and fulfillment of DID 
orders.  I don't know the particulars in the case of Vitelity.

All this to say:  everyone has outages, accounted for by a dizzying 
plethora of reasons.  At the scale at which most of the commoditised 
inputs into the ITSP supply chain operate, to talk about one as being 
materially more "reliable" than another, in some cosmological, 
holistic way, is somewhat sophistic.

The most you can really hope for is some proposition like "BruceTel 
seems to have a lot of problems with flaky media gateways in Bowling 
Green, KY".

-- Alex

-- 
Alex Balashov - Principal
Evariste Systems LLC
260 Peachtree Street NW
Suite 2200
Atlanta, GA 30303
Tel: +1-678-954-0670
Fax: +1-404-961-1892
Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/