On Mon, 21 Oct 1996 jbash@velvet.com wrote:
A situation where I have to "shop around" for connectivity depending on what site I want to talk to that day is just plain unacceptable.
If you're like most people working off site, there are a few hosts that you need to keep long TCP sessions open to, and the rest of the net that gets random traffic.
It doesn't look to me as though the loss is being introduced at the NAPS. If you look at the trace, you'll see that significant loss starts to appear within Alternet, well after MAE-west.
Traceroute is less useful a tool than you think in the face of congestive loss. Routers can and do selectively prioritize the queueing packets based on their type, and if I were a network operator I would have no hesitation about dropping traceroute or ping packets to low priority.
If I did interactive work under these conditions on a regular basis, I'd have gone insane long ago.
No, you would have changed ISPs a long time ago, instead of whining to NANOG that the entire world is providing sub-standard service. Ed