Operational: MAE-WEST

Fri Oct 31 05:23:06 UTC 1997

I talked with Matt Parnell(sp?) at MFS/Worldcom today (10/30) about the
issues at MAE-WEST and MAE-EAST and he told me that they were going to
start doing the upgrades at MAE-WEST around the second week of November.
This consisted of moving the switches onto new power and into the new colo
location.  He indicated that they were going to hold off on inserting more
Gigas in the fabric at MAE-WEST until all problems with MAE-EAST have been
resolved. 

As most people know MAE-EAST was upgraded from 3 to 6 Gigas and are adding
more trunks between existing Gigas.  I guess MFS/Worldcom found some
limitations of the DEC hardware and are working with them at this time to
resolve the problems.  MFS/Worldcom thinks that they have fixed most of
the packet loss problems but are now experiencing problems with the Gigas
rebooting every 24-30 hours.  As opposed to every 10minutes with 40%
packet loss; I guess this is improvement. 

As far as the future, Matt hinted that MFS/Worldcom may be experimenting
with an ATM product offering instead of FDDI for a next generation MAE
solution.  This would somehow introduce ATM into the current design.  He 
didn't comment any more on the details.

I bitched for about an hour at them for not keeping the NAP particiapants
informed as to the status of the MAEs - work, outages, etc.  Since the
customer service, or lack there off, has really sucked and the service has
been less than moderate.  I requested info on what was being done to
correct these problems.  He admited that the tech lists were not being
used because of a move from San Fran to Dallas but couldn't say any thing
else as to when things were going to get better. 

I guess if nothing happens we'll call his boss Larry Walberg. (I believe
he is the director of ops).  We (FNSI) have paged him a couple of times
before on some circuit issues and is very good at getting things done and 
people to move. 

Todd R. Stroup
Fiber Network Solutions, Inc.

On Thu, 30 Oct 1997, Chris Fairbanks wrote:

> Has anyone heard anything more from MFS/Worldcom about the problems at
> MAE-WEST?
> 
> 	Chris
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From:	Justin W. Newton [SMTP:justin at priori.net]
> > Sent:	Wednesday, October 29, 1997 5:47 PM
> > To:	dlr at bungi.com; nanog at merit.edu
> > Subject:	Re: Operational: MAE-WEST
> > 
> > At 11:37 AM 10/27/97 PST, Dave Rand wrote:
> > >Despite the (small) improvement last week, apparently achieved by
> > adding
> > >another FDDI between giga1 and gigis2, MAE-WEST loss continues.
> > >
> > >I'm currently seeing up to 40% loss between giga1 and giga2, and
> > about 30%
> > >between giga2 and giga3.
> > >
> > >I've contatacted Steve, but no word back, yet.  
> > 
> > Apparently DEC was making some CoolNewSoftware(TM) available today
> > which is
> > going to solve world hunger as well as packet loss between AMES and
> > MFS.
> > Anyone official care to comment?
> > 
> > **************************************************************
> > Justin W. Newton                        voice: +1-650-482-2840 	
> > Senior Network Architect                  fax: +1-650-482-2844
> > PRIORI NETWORKS, INC.                    http://www.priori.net
> > Legislative and Policy Director, ISP/C   http://www.ispc.org
> > "The People You Know.  The People You Trust."
> > **************************************************************
> 