Netcom Issues

Wed Jun 19 22:02:38 UTC 1996

>  I'm seeing alot of problems with Netcom, and I can't seem to get
>  any info from them, the net, or the normal grapevine.
>
>  Anyone have any info to share?

Would this be a good time to remind folks that Stan Barber set up a
list to discuss methods of inter-provider service outage notification
at the last NANOG.  Subscribe by sending a message to
outage-discuss-request at academ.com, with "subscribe" in the body of
the message.

Hopefully folks will begin to realize it is in their own self-interest
to let folks know when things aren't working.  Its hard to work on
fixing the problem when all your phone lines are swamped with customers
(and other providers) telling you things aren't working.  Not even
AT&T has enough telephone operators to handle all the calls when their
network goes down.

So far I've come up with two models.

Telephone model: inband notification, such as a busy signal.  The ideal
would be for a way to wedge an explaination into the ICMP unreachable
message.  This is similar to the phone company putting a message "You
call can't go through because of an earthquake in the area" instead of
just a busy signal.

Airline model: out-of-band notification, such as the arrivals/departures
displays at airports.  Query some (hopefully distributed) database for
current network information for each network.  This is similar to the
airport flight displays that say on-time, boarding, delayed, crashed
for each flight.

Remember, if you don't provide the information, your competitors will
make something up.  I've already seen one posting that (falsely) claimed
NETCOM went out of business.
-- 
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
  Affiliation given for identification not representation