A couple quick points: the place to go to for this kind
of thing should be your direct service provider, who hopefully
has some means of communicating with upstream and peer providers
when things are going wrong somehow, or at least might be
able to give you some additional information.
Ahem, my success rate at that has been less than stellar. If you guys
(you service providers, not you Sean) are so worried about being asked
questions in public (and short of com-priv, I see no more logical place
for this than NANOG if "local" questions don't work], why don't you
work on schemes to pro-actively publish performance data? Otherwise
you *will* get called to the table based on ping and traceroute data,
there just ain't no other way. Either *you* do it, or others will do it
for you, with the tools they find most appropriate, and all your
whining will eventually be discounted. Be pro-active, or give them
better tools. You *asked* to be in the kitchen, *you* better deliver a
working network, including at the Internet-systemic level and not only
in your own service provider centric environment. I suppose that if
you guys can't figure it out yourself, there is always the opportunity
to get it fixed by someone else. Like, ahem, regulation.