Horrible Service Agreements

Eric Osborne osborne at notcom.com
Sun Nov 30 06:13:06 UTC 1997


> > Another example.  Lets assume that someone in our upstream decided that we
> > MUST have a $250,000 router to connect to their system.  If we can't
> > provide such a beast, we are immediately terminated and required to pay
> > for the remaining year term.
> 
> On a T1?  Not likely.  I can't see them requiring any kind of upgrade that
> isn't required of all other like customers.  More likely this clause is
> there to make sure that you don't run some buggy version of software and
> not do something about it.
> 

Likelyhood of the potential upgrade doesn't matter.  If the contract says that
you have to upgrade whenever and to whatever the upstream says you do, then it's
perfectly OK for the upstream to say "You have to use <xxxx> brand equipment",
or something more ludicrous, like "You must upgrade your router to be able to
speak XAGP, the Xterious Autonomous-system Gateway Protocol, which is 
proprietary to me [upstream], and will cost you  $x,xxx,xxx.xx to run.  Have a
nice day!"

I think the proper way to execute contracts like this is to extend some form
of trust on both sides.  It's hard to do, given the litigous society we're in
nowadays, but that's really the right way to do it.  That's how I do it with
my customers.  Now, I'm not going to bid for the T1 business (Massachusetts
to Montana local loop is a lot more than $2500), but that's how I work.  The
official legalese is something pretty harsh, but the actual policy is "Don't
do anything bad more than once."*  I've had several customers decide that they
wanted to tell every single newsgroup about their product, and I took the heat
for it.  I then went to my customer, explained that if they did it again I 
could reposess everything they owned, including their eternal soul, and charge
them an arm and a leg doing it.  They stopped.  :)

Point is, business is still best done on a handshake.  Now, maybe in the
90s it's a handshake with a nasty contract to fall back on, but the handshake
should suffice for most things.

Contract language vs. actual behavior is a really tricky subject.  It's also
not really a NANOG thing, so I'll stop here....



eric



*if you're a spammer looking for a home, don't even waste my time....



ObNanog: Anybody have a handle on what the policies are for various backbones
(big four as well as others like Digex, AGIS, etc...) WRT customers acting as
transit ASs?  I work for a mid-sized MA-area provider, and we're starting to
get customers who want to multihome and run their own AS.  Who allows this 
(without a peering agreement!), who doesn't, and how much red tape trouble is
it?  



More information about the NANOG mailing list