Question: Which RFC should I consult to determine acceptable delay and packet loss?
RFCs are the result of IETF activities. The IETF is essentially a protocol standardization group, not an operations group. I don't think you perceive the IETF as "running" your network, or? There may not be much of an alternative, though, which to a large extend is the issue at hand. Nobody is responsible (individually or as a consortium or whatever) of this anarchically organized and largely uncoordinated (at a systemic level) global operational environment. While IETF/RFCs could be utilized somehow, this is not really an issue of theirs. I sure would not blame the IETF for not delivering here, is this is not their mandate. In other email I saw it seems that the important issues are hard to understand for some. I (and I suspect several others) don't really care much about a specific tactical issue (be it an outage or whatever). The issue is how to make the system work with predictable performance and a fate sharing attitude at a global level, in a commercial and competitive environment that is still extremely young at that, and attempts to accomodate everything from mom'n'pop shops to multi-billion dollar industry. And exhibits exponential usage and ubiquity growth, without the resources to upgrade quickly to satisfy all the demands. And no control over in-flows, and major disparities across the applications. And TCP flow control not working that well, as the aggregation of transactions is very heavy, and the packet-per-transaction count is so low on average that TCP may not be all that much better to the network than UDP (in terms of adjusting to jitter in available resources). Not to mention this age-old problem with routing table sizes and routing table updates.