links on the blink (fwd)

Sat Nov 4 15:04:49 UTC 1995

On Sat, 4 Nov 1995, Nathan Stratton wrote:

> On Fri, 3 Nov 1995, Hans-Werner Braun wrote:
> 
> > I think Dave has the right idea here. Given the lousy overall network
> > performance that I (and others) are often seeing for months from
> > varieties of service providers, I think the service providers should be
> > forced to provide rebates. I frequently have 10% packet losses to get
> > from where I am to the Bay area (via New York). And my service
> > provider (CERFnet) is telling me that their service provider (Sprint)
> > is not even answering to their trouble reports.
> 
> Well, I think the problem is that providers lock people in 1 and 2 year 
> contracts so if people get bad service they are stuck. That is why I only 
> have month to month service, if people don't like there T1 then they can 
> quit. I think we need more providers to do that, I know of a lot users 
> that are on providers that want to switch, but have 8 months left on 
> their contract.

Some comments from my side, which are, however, not official comments of 
IDT Internet Services:

Internet works the way that a provider can only guarantee a standard of 
quality within the perimeter of the provider's networks. E.g. guarantee a 
customer that he is a certain number of hops away to the meetpoints, or 
hand out a latency matrix between POPs, guarantee that the packet loss is 
under a certain margin, and of course, guarantee a certain percentage of 
uptime.

There is no way to talk about end to end connectivity quality assurance. 
I have at all times at least one customer raging about how bad we are 
reachable, and that his partners on other networks can only get to us 
with such and such a delay/packet loss/unavailability. 

The understanding must be that a provider can ony control the own 
network. How traffic is routed outside is mostly uncontrollable, because 
most people do not run route servers yet that would take a policy from 
the radb (I have no special policy in btw, but will do this as soon as we 
run our route servers).

>From this I would say it is a very different issue, if a provider has 
quality of service problems within the own network: e.g. a NOC not 
answering, sluggish links, packet loss above a normal tolerable level. 
I would say, that in 
such cases any contract can be terminated, and sued. But, of course a 
customer must be certain that the problems are caused within his 
provider's network. That's where most people are not sure, of course, 
even most 'consultants' have in reality no clue how to check something 
like this.

Mike

> 
> Nathan Stratton		  CEO, NetRail, Inc.    Your Gateway to the World!
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----------------------------------------------------------
                                                   IDT
Michael F. Nittmann                             ---------
Senior Network Architect                        \       /
(201) 928 1000 xt 500                            -------
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