outages, quality monitoring, trouble tickets, etc

Tue Nov 28 00:11:26 UTC 1995

OK. I am a small network service provider and I have two customers. 
One has service that is available 100% of the time. The other has
service that due to various problems is available only 50% of the
time (not sure why they stay with me, but I am happy to take their
money). So what is the availability that I should report to potential
new customers?  100%  50% or 75%  Does it matter that the reason the
one customer has only 50% availability is that the room where the
router at that customer's site is underwater every other day due to
no fault of my own?

It is because of these sorts of questions that I never know what
it means when someone says that their network is available 99.9%
of the time. Hell at least part of MichNet is available 100% of
the time, but that never seems to cut it with the folks who don't
have service right now.

  -Jeff Ogden 
   Merit/MichNet