I think the traceroute fails at this hop. Outages work just like routing, you pay , X pays MCI, if your not happy you call X, X calls MCI, if X doesn't call MCI, then why would you buy service from them? This is the standard operator proceure, if there ever was one.
(I hope the formatting is OK. I'm not a Lotus Notes fan ...) OK, here's a scenario for you. Traceroute fails inside MCI somewhere. So you call your upstream, and said upstream only has a peering relationship with MCI -- ie: not a paying customer. I'm under the impression that unless you're a paying customer, then (to quote a 70's phrase) "you don't have nothin' comin'". For those ISP/IBP's out there, can a BGP peer open a trouble ticket with you to have a problem looked at? Or does the "paying customer" have to open the TT. What if I can't get the "paying customer" to open up the TT (ie: you think I can get sex.com to open a TT with their upstream, as if they would care longer than the time to hit the "D" key on my message). rob