MAE-East - Operational question

Wed Aug 19 21:34:20 UTC 1998

On Wed, 19 Aug 1998, Alex Bligh wrote:

>Does anyone care about trying to get packet loss over MAE-East reduced
>any more? Some peers have quite heavy packet loss to them from where
>I'm sitting, and have done for a good while. It seems to me it's
>not a problem with my port, and I don't think I have head of line blocking
>problems, which means it's either a Gigaswitch problem, or their ports
>are simply full. Does anyone still hassle Worldcom and peers about this
>or have we lost hope of ever getting it fixed (i.e. people peer privately
>or hope other exchange points or a replacement will come along).

My attempts at getting answers out of them were responded with "we are
aware of the problem"  "we are *trying* to add more capacity"  "we cant
give you any completion dates".  Of course, this was a few months ago.

I'm not sure what the problem is.  Modern ethernet/packet switches claim
to handle 20-40 Gbits/s.  MAE-WEST is peaking around 1.65 Gbits/s.  If
the Gigaswitch has reached the end of its useful life at the MAEs.....
replace them.

So who is signing up for the MAE-WEST/EAST ATM service?  We're considering
it, but MFS wont tell us who else is considering it.  Kind of makes it
hard to sign a 3 year contract with no idea if there will be other people
to peer with.