Hi Josh,

Gen-I is an integrator who will probably be looking to sell you services on Telecom's backbone, and FX is a network operator. Both Telecom and FX have their own fibre present in AKL/WLG/CHC, same as the orange provider who sells a product called PIP. These organizations have different approaches to doing business.

FX is a Cisco based provider who sells Ethernet, wavelength, and dark fiber, with their own network in two dozen or so major centres. FX spends money by digging holes and putting cables in them, then putting moderately priced equipment (German car price, not expensive house price) on the end driving a handful of redundant 10gbps Ethernet links.

Gen-I/Telecom have their own fibre *everywhere* and have traffic loadings orders of magnitude higher than FX. They have an Alcatel-Lucent multi-service core that does all sorts of neat things, and does them well. The gear on the ends of their cables (which are now mostly 50/50 owned with Chorus) is house priced, and does everything. I'm sure if you needed every 13th packet set with the evil bit, it could be done.

The philosophies of network operation (provide Ethernet or provide Everything) can lead to a pretty big difference in price. Hope this helps.

-JB



On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 9:55 AM, Josh Farrelly <josh@base-2.co.nz> wrote:

Hi all

�

One of our customers is looking at migrating away from their current WAN carrier and have nailed down their options to either FX Networks or Gen-i. This is a 3 office site (AKL/WGTN/CHCH) with relatively fat PIP pipes between all offices, and 20/30Mbps to the Internet from the AKL & WGTN locations using carrier managed BGP devices to allow for Internet failover.

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Obviously the overview of services according to the provider themselves are understandably at least somewhat bias, but I was wondering whether anybody from the NZNOG community has any objective views on each with regards to reliability and performance? For example FX seems to cost significantly less for relatively the same thing, however without personally having a lot of experience in provider topologies I can�t justify being able to go back to the customer vouching for either provider either way.

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Any replies, either on or off-list are appreciated.

�

Regards,

�

Josh Farrelly

�


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