Quick Question on Industry Standard

Sun Apr 7 00:46:43 UTC 2002

On Sat, Apr 06, 2002 at 06:18:02PM -0500, Sean Donelan wrote:
> 
> There is no industry technical standard.  Different Internet service
> providers advertise a wide-variety of numbers set by their marketing
> departments.  Depending on the customer and provider, you may negogiate
> other values more suitable for your budget and requirements.  It is
> common for ISPs to advertise 100% uptime guarantee*.  That asterisk is
> the critical piece of information. Most service providers loath to call
> anything an "outage" no matter how bad the service gets.  Just what is
> emergency scheduled maintenance or routine emergency operation?

My personal favorite example along this line came from Verio, who tried to
claim that they shouldn't have to pay an SLA credit for a 24 hour outage
because, even though their monitoring clearly showed that their router 
would route for 30 seconds and then not route for 30 seconds, that was a 
"bunch of 30 second outages" and not a 24 hour outage.

Just remember, it's not an outage, it's an (quoting AboveNet here) 
"unscheduled network event". :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177  (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA  B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)