ATT GigE issue on 11/19 in Kansas City

Wed Nov 30 18:56:37 UTC 2011

What I have seen lately with telco's building and operating Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) based Ethernet networks is that relatively inexperienced telco staff are in charge of configuring and operating the networks, where telco operational staff are unaware of layer 2 Ethernet network nuances, nuances that in an Enterprise environment network engineers must know, or else. I have seen numerous instances of telco MEF layer 2 outages of 20-30 seconds where my layer 3 routing keep-alives time out. Subsequent telco root cause analysis has determined that spanning tree convergence brought down multiple links in the telco MEF network. One telco technician, assigned to Ethernet switch configuration, told me that a 20-30 second network hang is not really a big deal.

-----Original Message-----
From: Brad Fleming [mailto:bdflemin at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 30, 2011 9:58 AM
To: Joe Maimon
Cc: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: ATT GigE issue on 11/19 in Kansas City

>>>
>> In either case I'm a customer and will likely never be told what went wrong. I'm OK with that so long as it doesn't happen again!
>>
> Does being told what happened somehow prevent it from happening it again?

Nope. But if this same issue crops up again we'll have to "work the system" harder and demand calls with knowledgeable people; not an easy task for a customer my size (I'm not Starbucks with thousands of sites). A single outage can be understood, seeing repeated issues means I want to know what's going wrong. If the issue is something simply mitigated and the service provider hasn't taken steps, I need to start looking for a different service provider. Everything has a little downtime every now and again and I can live with it on lower speed circuits.
>
> What is the utilitarian value in an RFO?

To determine whether its an honest mistake or a more systemic issue that should push me toward another option.

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