[c-nsp] T3 or Ethernet delivery?

[Mesiatowsky, Shawn]

to detect a failure when the link is still up, you can use ip sla to ping the downstream router. You can then use embedded event manager to track your sla and trigger an event upon failure. The event could be to email you, send an snmp trap, or run a tcl script such as changing static routes. The embedded event manager in IOS is very powerful.

-----Original Message-----
From: cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net [mailto:cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Seth Mattinen
Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 1:15 AM
To: cisco-nsp
Subject: [c-nsp] T3 or Ethernet delivery?

One of my carriers has given me a choice for a new circuit delivery: T3 or Ethernet. My outside world circuit experience is all non-Ethernet, so I have a few questions the sales group wasn't able to answer. I'd love to hear some real world experience. The cost difference between the two is not significant enough to be the sole deciding factor and I'm not using pure-Ethernet platforms so it's just a matter of adding the right interface card.

How do you detect a "down" condition on Ethernet? My experience is that the interface could be up/up because Ethernet doesn't know about anything further down the line and ends up throwing packets into a magical black hole. Or worse, secret packet loss.

Can you even troubleshoot Ethernet? Normally if I'm seeing something like out of frame errors or AIS, I can say "hey, there's a problem and it's X". It scares me to think of opening trouble tickets as "it's broken and I can't really tell you why".

With a T3 I can be fairly certain that if there aren't any alarms that my end is happily talking to the other end. How does one accomplish the same with Ethernet? A periodic "ping" seems rather ambiguous as a health check.

Since this is an outside world connection (i.e. I'm not in a colo) the slightly lower cost and convenience factor of Ethernet doesn't override my desire to stick with a T3 for its management properties and the sleeping good at night feeling I get knowing there are no alarms. My gut tells me to stick with it even though Ethernet delivery is what all the cool kids are doing these days, so any insight is appreciated. Thanks!

~Seth
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