COOK: I am going to resurrect the bad advertisement thread because I have
some additional knowledge of the subject that I hope will be constructive
to share with the Nanog community. After Mat Petach's posts I have done
some further research. The 'evil ISP' was jvnc.net also known as GES. I
have known these people and their subsequent history in some considerable
detail since I joined the staff of the JVNC supercomputer center in
September 1987.
I had a free account there (in return for my newsletter) from the summer
of 1992 until midsummer of this year. From November 1994 until April 17
1996 I used it for all my email activity. In mid April of 1996 a routing
problem appeared that made it unusable for me and I switched my email and
base of operations to net access.
One highly significant thing that has not been said is that this "evil
ISP" is the one that Princeton University depends on for its connectivity
to the internet. JVNCnet is (was?) one of the NSFnet regionals and has
been getting inter regional connectivity money from NSF in order to use
MCI to connect Princeton to the rest of the Internet. As Mat Petach wrote,
this is not the first time *HE* has had trouble. It is not the first time
that many other people have had trouble either. JVNC has lost quite a few
major corporate connections over the last 2 or 3 years. And one day early
last month Princeton University lost its internet connectivity at roughly
10 AM. It wasn't restored until roughly 6 PM the same day. Less than a
week later it suffered a second multi hour outage.
I believe that there is ample evidence that the folk at Princeton have to
be very aware of the nature of their provider. Yet I have seen no signs
that Princeton is ready to pull up its stakes. Yesterday afternoon, I
called Ira Fuch's office. (Ira is VP of computing and telecom at princeton
if I have his title right.) I told his secretary my concerns indicating I
was contemplating going public with them shortly and saying that I'd like
to communicate with Ira to get his take on the matter. I called up today
at 3:30 pm EST and was told that Ira had no comment on my call nor on the
email from this thread that I sent him. I have also called Sergio Heker,
the GES CEO and asked his secretary to ask him to call me.... Leaving with
her a summary of the reasons for my call. An hour later I received a call
from an old acquaintance who happened to be visiting Sergio who apparently
didn't feel up to calling me. We talked for an hour and as a result of
that conversation I see no reason to change my assessment. An assessment
which also has as part of its foundation a continuous input of email
messages from various sources describing developments there over the past
6 months.