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. Forwarded message:
From nobody Thu Nov 2 04:40:21 1995 X-Authentication-Warning: upeksa.sdsc.edu: nobody owned process doing -bs Message-Id: <199511021201.AA05016@quark.isi.edu> To: Kate Lance <clance@sol.newcastle.edu.au> Cc: J.Crowcroft@cs.ucl.ac.uk, end2end-interest@ISI.EDU Subject: Re: links on the blink In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 02 Nov 95 15:26:44 +1100." <199511020426.PAA22322@lily.newcastle.edu.au> Date: Thu, 02 Nov 95 11:55:17 +0000 From: Dave Mills <D.Mills@cs.ucl.ac.uk>
jon, Kate, Lack of specific performance data is surely disappointing; however, I used to work for COMSAT, so understand the corporate mentality of such dinosaurs. Let me suggest we mount an ongoing experiment in which representative links of deserving carriers are monitored, perhaps with pings launched from cron jobs, and the results submitted for publication in respected national media, like ISOC, ACM CCR, NY Times, etc. One of my (failed) missions at COMSAT was to persuade the lawyers to approve a tariff filing for a packet satellite service. Their stated opposition was based on an assumption that COMSAT would have to rebate charges for those packets not actually delivered to the destination gateway. Our course is clear. File requests for refund with the cognizant public utilities commission. The FCC would of course laugh; however, the reaction of the <state> PUCs would be most interesting, especially if it was pointed out that the rationale for granting the license in the first place was service to the public sector. Dave