Company announcements don't seem to be helping... but hopefully it will turn around soon-
BBN Guarantees Service Availability
Received: September 26, 1996 06:23am EDT From: Inter@ctive Week
From Inter@ctive Week Online for September 25, 1996 by Paula Bernier
BBN Corp. next month will begin offering customers money-back service
quality guarantees.
Telephone companies have long offered service guarantees for their
business customers, but the idea of offering service guarantees for
Internet-related services is a relatively new phenomenon.
Customers that enroll in BBN Planet Internet Advantage will receive a
credit for one full day of service for any backbone outage of 15 minutes
or more in a 24-hour period. The company will respond to all requests
within two business days.
The guarantee covers all equipment within BBN's points of presence,
POPs, all wiring within BBN POPs, and all telephone circuits between BBN
POPs. It does not include customer premises equipment, telephone
circuits between customer locations and BBN POPs or other non-BBN
equipment or connections.
In line with the effort, BBN Planet has pumped up its Internet backbone
to provide 99.9 percent availability, according to Kathryn Roy, service
line manager for Internet Advantage. Specifically, BBN has engineered
its enhanced network so that all backbone Cisco 7500 series routers are
backed up with another router. All of BBN's backbone POPs are now
located in telephone company facilities, which means those POPs have DC
power backup and the alternative to use generator-based power. DC
battery backup is available for up to four hours, whereas standard AC
power backup only works for 15 minutes, Roy said. Routers within the POP
are connected via redundant Fiber Distributed Date Interface, or FDDI,
network rings and an OC-3 (155-megabit-per-second) fiber-optic interface
or by a DEC Gigaswitch. The POPs are connected by redundant T3 (45-Mbps)
leased lines.
If there is an outage, the network automatically reroutes traffic across
other BBN backbone connections.
In addition, BBN's primary network operations center in Cambridge,
Mass., is backed up with a staffed center in Columbia, Md.
"We've been really ruthless about standardizing our equipment
configuration, so when a problem occurs we want people to be able to fix
it, even if they're brain dead," said Roy.
Businesses can access the new BBN backbone via leased lines or frame
relay from more than 300 nationwide locations. |
