On 3 Jun, Raymond J. Henry wrote:

Last I checked, static IP addresses drove the price of Shaw's service up over MTS's (MTS supplies 2 statics with their business accounts)... Is anyone seeing a benefit of Shaw over MTS?

Are you kidding? MTS sucks big time. Shaw Extreme clobbers MTS on download speed, and more importantly upload speed. Upload is at least 4-8X faster with Shaw Extreme. Latency is miniscule Extreme-to-Extreme (20-40ms). MTS can barely get under 100ms on a good day. MTS is unreliable, disconnects you regularly, and requires crappy PPPoE with crappy authentication which always causes problems (not like Shaw's plug-n-go) especially when MTS decides to unilaterally change your user id suffix without telling you, which has happened to my customers at least 3 times. And the icing: they block *incoming* port 25, which has zero anti-spam benefit.

I could go on, but you get the point. And I'm speaking from direct experience because at least 3 of my customers are still on MTS because their buildings are not wired for Shaw.

On 4 Jun, Raymond J. Henry wrote:

Oh, geez. You know, you absolutely have not tested MTS against Shaw in every area of this city.

I speak as someone with direct first-hand administrative experience using both MTS and Shaw at around 20 client sites. Most clients were at one time using MTS and all that can have since switched to Shaw. I have tons of experience dealing with MTS and I still do it on a daily basis. My customers are spread out over the entire city and even 3 rural locations. I think I am in an excellent position to offer useful advice and opinions on Shaw vs MTS.

My MTS connection is fast and reliable

Now who's the one not doing empirical studies? I actually have done NUMEROUS bandwidth and latency studies for my customers faced with the Shaw vs MTS choice. My VoIP customers are especially concerned with such studies. I test real-world connections between MTS connections, Shaw connections and MTS/Shaw connections.

Every time I run the tests, I get massive differences between MTS and Shaw, especially Shaw Extreme. To put this in real-world context for you, I have one customer we had to multihome to 2 MTS connections just to barely achieve what Shaw regular offered in upload bandwidth. And I was not lying when I said latency differences are on the order of 3-5X.

I've never noticed a disconnect in well over a year now.

Lucky you. But your router probably gracefully handles disconnects and you aren't even aware of it. Since my customers are IP-address sensitive, I know every time MTS does a kick.

Latency is not an issue for me.

Again, lucky you. Doesn't help my VoIP customers where latency is extremely important.

MTS is EXTREMELY reliable. I've yet to experience ANY problem with PPPoE/MTS. MTS has never changed a thing on my account without working on my behalf.

Do I need to say it? I've had at least 2 customers who have had their suffix changed from @resa to @res1 to @bslv on more than one occasion, without any prior notice. As an administrator, that's a headache I just don't need to deal with, trying to work with a customer over the phone to troubleshoot a MTS induced problem. The Shaw way is much better.

Last time I spoke with Shaw, they came right out and told me that they could not provide me with the service I get with MTS. "We don't consider there to be a problem until speeds drop below double digits". BELOW DOUBLE-DIGITS!!

True or not, who cares? My Shaw customers (including myself) get insane speeds all the time. My d/l speeds from most fast internet sites are over 10Mb/s, sometimes peaking around 13MB/s.

MTS gives you the option of higher d/l bandwidths but not higher u/l.

For some quick laughs, I am at this very moment running some tests. You be the judge! Don't believe me, run them yourself. Note: I freely admit these are extremely quick and dirty and such small samples that they are hardly authoritative, but they certainly do illustrate the orders of magnitude we are dealing with here and match up with my more exhaustive tests.

uploading 5MB file from Shaw Extreme: 120KB/s from MTS : 25KB/s (hahahahahahaha!)

Try running a WAN, remote access, VoIP, etc to a satellite office for a small business on 25KB/s!

ping times, 60 pings, 1/sec (avg is the important stat):

min avg max MTS-MTS : 34.468/45.474/142.412/20.103 MTS-MUUG : 58.606/70.673/437.312/48.628 ShawEx-ShawEx: 14.363/33.823/ 85.973/18.809 ShawEx-MUUG : 9.609/14.217/ 40.591/ 6.331

OK, so MTS is ok within MTS, but the instant you go outside MTS (probably 90% of real-world traffic) you are screwed on latency. Shaw's connection to the outside world appears to be a much better pipe. You're looking at an avg of 15ms vs 70ms! Holy!

So maybe you had a bad experience with MTS and have some hard-on against

Hey, if MTS came out with a better product that provided better latency and upload bandwidth, I'd be all over it. But they haven't, and probably won't/can't with the current technology.

something in the same price range with the same service and speed, MTS is the only one.

Uh, have you even ever tried Shaw? Now who's the one talking out their @#$? Show me the numbers that indicate MTS isn't the slow substandard crap my original argument says it is and maybe you'll get somewhere. Your entire argument is based on "it works for me" and "I talked to Shaw and they didn't say what I wanted them to". Not very convincing.

Your email read like the old Ford vs Mopar pissing matches of 40 years ago..... :P

Except that my results and the realities directly translate into real- world business requirements that absolutely affect the day to day operations of my customers. Just try running a WAN and VoIP over a single DSL line (even with agressive QoS) and you'll instantly see what I am talking about.

John Lange wrote:

And from my personal experience, Shaw business accounts get a far different level of technical support than residential.

Absolutely.. I call up my rep or email her, and stuffs done in less than 5 minutes (during business hours). I never had a rep when I was an mts business dsl customer, and I always had to wait on hold to speak to someone unless it was 8am -- and even then I only ever got straight through on a very small number of occasions.

Theo

A more complete discussion can be found at (surprise!) Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multihoming

I'm leaning more toward John's position, but it's still not entirely clear to me.

----- Original Message ----- From: Trevor Cordes trevor@tecnopolis.ca Date: Wednesday, June 6, 2007 6:25 pm Subject: [RndTbl] Multihoming

On 5 Jun, John Lange wrote:

...

I'm in a nit-picky mood so I'll just point out that plugging 2 connections into a firewall that supports dual wan is not multi-

homing. http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid7_gci212611,00.html

Sounds like the setup to me. We have a firewall/router (linux) that has 2 DSL links (2 separate modems on 2 separate lines) to the internet (2 separate real-world IP addresses). Some traffic (port-based) goes out #1, some goes out #2.

Sorry if I got the terms wrong, but that always meant "multihoming" to me. I could very well be wrong.

---

Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.mb.ca http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable

Sean Walberg wrote:

A multihomed host sits in two different subnets. By that definition, Trevor's box is multihomed. So is my Linux box at home with one Shaw connection and one private LAN connection -- it has a routing decision

Hi Sean,

I have always thought that multihomed meant there were two paths to a host. I have never thought it as just being connected to two networks. I would not consider the the Linux box above as being multihomed since a host on the LAN or the Internet can only reach one interface not both.

In Trevor's case it is sort of multihomed because a host on the Internet can access his server via two IP addresses so there are multiple paths to his server. But I do think we should really reserve multihomed to imply what you suggest: two different carrier connections and BGP.

-- Bill

Fair enough. I'll accept that.

If you have a look here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multihomed

it does allow that there are several things loosely considered to be multi-homed.

However, in the 3rd definition "Multiple Links, Single IP address (Space)", it says "This is what in general is meant with Multihoming" and that is the definition I have always gone by.

In short, if you aren't doing BGP, you aren't multi-homed, but as with most things that people don't understand well the term has been diluted.

Just like calling a home Linksys firewall a "router", even though it doesn't route anything.

John

On Wed, 2007-06-06 at 18:25 -0500, Trevor Cordes wrote:

On 5 Jun, John Lange wrote:

...

I'm in a nit-picky mood so I'll just point out that plugging 2 connections into a firewall that supports dual wan is not multi-homing.

http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid7_gci212611,00.html

Sounds like the setup to me. We have a firewall/router (linux) that has 2 DSL links (2 separate modems on 2 separate lines) to the internet (2 separate real-world IP addresses). Some traffic (port-based) goes out #1, some goes out #2.

Sorry if I got the terms wrong, but that always meant "multihoming" to me. I could very well be wrong.

---

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