BCP Question: Handling trouble reports from non-customers

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

I think my previous post may have touched on a more global issue.

Given the number of such posts I have seen over time, and, my  
experiences trying to
report problems to other ISPs in the past, it seems to me that a high  
percentage of
ISPs, especially the larger ones, simply don't allow for the  
possibility of a non-customer
needing to report a problem with the ability to reach one of their  
customers.

I'm curious how people feel about this.  As I see it, there are a  
number of possible
responses:

1.	Don't help the person at all.  Tell them to contact the customer  
they are
        trying to reach and have the customer report the problem.  This seems,
        by far, to be the most popular approach in my experience, but, it makes
        for a very frustrating experience to the person reporting the problem.

2.	Accept any trouble report and attempt to resolve it or determine  
that it
	is outside of your network.  This approach is the least frustrating  
to the
        end user, but, probably creates a resource allocation and cost problem.

3.      Have a procedure for triage which allows a quick determination if the
        problem appears to be within your network.  Using that procedure,
        reject problems which appear to be outside of your network while
        accepting problems that appear to be within your network.

It seems to me that option 3 probably poses the best cost/benefit  
tradeoff,
but, it is the approach least taken from my observations.  So, I figured
I'd try and start a discussion on the topic and see what people thought.

Feel free to comment on list or directly to me (I'll summarize), but,  
if you
want to tell me I'm off-topic or whatever, please complain directly  
to me
without bothering the rest of the people on the list.  I believe that  
this
is an operational issue within scope of Nanog, but, I can see the
argument that it's a business practices question instead.

Owen

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