The current method should probably be: locate where the packet loss occurs, forward it to your provider, your provider forwards it to his, and so on. Yes, there is no formal mechanism to my knowledge, but should we really make one? If we start to formalize then we have later to formalize the meetpoint relationships (who is responsible for packet loss on a meetpoint network?). A better point of pressure: chose a provider with shorter internal paths. On the Internet anyone can kick the tires of any network by sending probing data accross it. You get latency, hop count, and throughput of the smallest link in your path. The job to find this out is a consultant's job. The consultant knows about the Internet topology, and how to quickly find out if a provider will be ok for the wanted connectivity, or not. Scopes of connectivity can be global reachability (trading off maybe hopcounts and comparing on offered routes and latency), short paths (for virtual private networks or national connectivity), points of presence in your business locations. If everyone would chose, then the now big networks, that offer an impressive display of capital investment (called excessive hopcount by some people with negative attitude ;-) ), will probably redisign their routing (or why do some connections backtrack via both coasts and then to the next metropole 200 miles away?). I would say, that market pressure is the best regulatory agent: pinches directly into the providers pocketbook. I accept this and design for customers, and have customer needs and quality issues in mind when the network grows (which it does currently tremendously). Instead of organizational reglementation, I would put the current path of Internet routing forward: with current tools it is possible to include routing decisions of networks around a provider in that providers routing topology. It is just a matter of time to implement it. Mike On Sat, 4 Nov 1995, Hans-Werner Braun wrote:
I will not go into a point by point rebuttal here, even though I generally do not subscribe to your arguments. I am not planning on "winning" here, I just want to get the issues on the table and evaluate the solution space. Just let me ask you, as a customer who fairly frequently experiences 10% packet loss between major Internet locations across major service providers (no mom and pop shops in the middle or at the end points), how would you suggest I deal with that? My complaints to the involved service providers have typically gotten unanswered by the national service provider, and saying "we can't do anything about it except letting our national service provider know" by my regional service provider. There is no quality control at the inter-ISP level. I want to see that fixed. I don't care how, I do know that the current situation is intolerable. I believe that this is prime NANOG (and IEPG) business. NSF and the feds are out, with the NSFNET backbone dismantling, and the kitchen you asked for to cook (ahem!) in is all yours to get your tailfeathers burned in all by yourself.
---------------------------------------------------------- IDT Michael F. Nittmann --------- Senior Network Architect \ / (201) 928 1000 xt 500 ------- (201) 928 1888 FAX \ / mn@ios.com --- V IOS