Outage (planned and unplanned) notification

Sat Apr 12 01:12:40 UTC 1997

>Got off the phone w/Hector @MCI indicating that they are currently have
>problems with their OC12 ckt in Illinois.  Routing through their network
>is getting beat up...

I've noticed the sprint outage list has become very quiet, as has the
MCI outage list.  They seem to be quiet even during and after widely
known problems.  The same is true of most providers I bother to track.
Even those providers I have signed agreements which include notification
requirements.

Since I still notice end-to-end interruptions of service, I don't think
the network has really become as reliable as the lack of outage notifications
might indicate.  Are folks just not bothering to keep everyone informed?
Should I go back to nagging your NOC folks with phone calls?

Perhaps its just different expectations.  For example, I don't bother
to notify people about MAE-West outages that effect everyone because I
assume the operator of MAE-West should handle that, and a NxN set of
providers notifying each other isn't helpful.  And a lot of the time
extraneous notifications just muck up the trouble ticket system.

Is there anything that will encourage pro-active notification?
-- 
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
  Affiliation given for identification not representation