Re: Westnet and Utah outage

[joliveto () cwi net]

Hans;

Sorry...I waited for additional replies but you seemed to be the only one to 
take my bait.  My question was rhetorical.  

I hear all this complaining on this forum about unacceptable delay and packet 
loss by the ISP Community yet no "respected" industry standards body has yet 
set QOS guidelines for ISP's!  An old management dictum says "if its 
important, measure it".

I know where to look for QOS criteria on my physical plant (T1/DS3's), I even 
know where to look for QOS criteria for my old X.25 network.  If we want 
things to get better w/i the ISP Community...let's define what better is.

- jeff -


On Thu, 23 Nov 95, hwb () upeksa sdsc edu (Hans-Werner Braun) wrote:
> > Question: Which RFC should I consult to determine acceptable delay and 
packet 
> > loss?
>
> RFCs are the result of IETF activities. The IETF is essentially a
> protocol standardization group, not an operations group. I don't think
> you perceive the IETF as "running" your network, or? There may not be
> much of an alternative, though, which to a large extend is the issue at
> hand. Nobody is responsible (individually or as a consortium or
> whatever) of this anarchically organized and largely uncoordinated (at
> a systemic level) global operational environment. While IETF/RFCs could
> be utilized somehow, this is not really an issue of theirs. I sure
> would not blame the IETF for not delivering here, is this is not their
> mandate.
>
> In other email I saw it seems that the important issues are hard to
> understand for some. I (and I suspect several others) don't really care
> much about a specific tactical issue (be it an outage or whatever).
> The issue is how to make the system work with predictable performance
> and a fate sharing attitude at a global level, in a commercial and
> competitive environment that is still extremely young at that, and
> attempts to accomodate everything from mom'n'pop shops to multi-billion
> dollar industry. And exhibits exponential usage and ubiquity growth,
> without the resources to upgrade quickly to satisfy all the demands.
> And no control over in-flows, and major disparities across the
> applications. And TCP flow control not working that well, as the
> aggregation of transactions is very heavy, and the
> packet-per-transaction count is so low on average that TCP may not be
> all that much better to the network than UDP (in terms of adjusting to
> jitter in available resources). Not to mention this age-old problem
> with routing table sizes and routing table updates.


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Jeff Oliveto                            |       Phone:  +1.703.760.1764 
Sr.Mgr Opns Technical Services          |       Fax:    +1.703.760.3321
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