[c-nsp] Routing Problem - MCI/GT/Level3 - Puzzled

[Paul Stewart]

Hi folks...

Been trying to solve this issue for past few days and puzzled.. hoping
someone on the list sees the solution faster than I have..;)

We are AS11666 and one of our netblocks is 216.168.96.0/19

Our upstreams are Level(3) via another company (2 AS hops), Group Telecom,
and recently MCI.  We just happily dropped Cogent due to problems with
stability....

When we turned up our MCI connection, our performance was very poor.  What I
mean is that they were doing about 10% of our traffic in total.  I can
verify our routes are leaving MCI's network just fine (my first thought) but
I cannot figure out why (given their AS size) someone like Group Telecom is
outperforming them almost 5 times the traffic, if not even more.  Level(3)
is just "humming along" with it's normal traffic levels....

We even went so far as to prepend Group Telecom's connection THREE times
expecting drastic changes in traffic.  The traffic on MCI is now 30% of our
total so there was *some* increase but not nearly the amount we were looking
for.

Long long story shorter.... we have been in contact with MCI about this and
continue to investigate but so far the response has generally been that
Group Telecom is "clobbering" our routes making themselves more attractive
to their peers/upstreams than MCI.  I have opened a ticket at Group Telecom
to question more about this .... so far I"m a little lost...

Anyone provide me clues on what I"m missing here?  GT isn't probably 1/10th
the size of MCI so I anticipated huge traffic levels .... and I hate
prepending whenever I can avoid it... three prepends seems completely
nuts....  and yes, I've spent a lot of time on route-servers looking for our
routes and there always seems to be a preference towards GT and/or
Level(3)....

Appreciate any input...

Paul