> I think Dave has the right idea here. Given the lousy overall network
> performance that I (and others) are often seeing for months from
> varieties of service providers, I think the service providers should be
> forced to provide rebates. I frequently have 10% packet losses to get
> from where I am to the Bay area (via New York). And my service
> provider (CERFnet) is telling me that their service provider (Sprint)
> is not even answering to their trouble reports.
Well, I think the problem is that providers lock people in 1 and 2 year
contracts so if people get bad service they are stuck. That is why I only
have month to month service, if people don't like there T1 then they can
quit. I think we need more providers to do that, I know of a lot users
that are on providers that want to switch, but have 8 months left on
their contract.
Some comments from my side, which are, however, not official comments of
IDT Internet Services:
Internet works the way that a provider can only guarantee a standard of
quality within the perimeter of the provider's networks. E.g. guarantee a
customer that he is a certain number of hops away to the meetpoints, or
hand out a latency matrix between POPs, guarantee that the packet loss is
under a certain margin, and of course, guarantee a certain percentage of
uptime.
There is no way to talk about end to end connectivity quality assurance.
I have at all times at least one customer raging about how bad we are
reachable, and that his partners on other networks can only get to us
with such and such a delay/packet loss/unavailability.
The understanding must be that a provider can ony control the own
network. How traffic is routed outside is mostly uncontrollable, because
most people do not run route servers yet that would take a policy from
the radb (I have no special policy in btw, but will do this as soon as we
run our route servers).
From this I would say it is a very different issue, if a provider has
quality of service problems within the own network: e.g. a NOC not
answering, sluggish links, packet loss above a normal tolerable level.
I would say, that in
such cases any contract can be terminated, and sued. But, of course a
customer must be certain that the problems are caused within his
provider's network. That's where most people are not sure, of course,
even most 'consultants' have in reality no clue how to check something
like this.
Mike