SoftLayer IS The Planet. SoftLayer was bought out by The Planet and they just kept the "SoftLayer" name for branding and marketing purposes. The Planet was NOT bought out by SoftLayer as everybody seems to think.
Well...it was all one big merger actually. GI Partners actually bought them both as two completely separate portfolio companies, and merged them together after the fact, so in the grand scheme of things, neither one bought the other. When I refer to SL "taking over", I'm talking about post-merger.
All that aside, as soon as the merger happened (and the change was made to the Softlayer name), the new company went to hell. I'm guessing it's actually the EV1 side of things, as they were always a crappy budget provider. I'm guessing it's all their techs. who stayed on board, probably because they were used to working for much of less of a paycheck. Of course, all speculation, but there was a huge degradation in quality after the merger. It doesn't take more than a quick search on WHT to see the stupidity that goes on in their tech. support department.
They might have a great network. In fact, I always liked their network, when they were ThePlanet exclusively. But I had just as much luck, if not better, after transferring to Colo4, and actually saw improvements in ping times, etc. almost across the board, plus their techs. were FAR more knowledgeable, and far more personal. Now most of my server deployments are with WebNX out in their LA racks, and their service completely blows away the other two. I have only been with them for a year, but have had 100% network and server uptime (aside from our own reboots). Neither of the other two ever came close to that. There was always some sort of "maintenance" going on with TP routers and such, and Colo4 developed a quirky, little routing issue a couple times. The servers now have been absolutely rock solid. *cross my fingers*.
And, I get to be happy without the higher cost and ungodly upgrade costs on the SL servers.