I thought that routers were supposed to send ICMP Source-Quench messages when they got congested? Or is this something that the proponents of QoS didn't decide on? -Mat -----Original Message----- From: Roeland Meyer [mailto:rmeyer@mhsc.com] Sent: Friday, November 24, 2000 8:58 AM To: 'Sean Donelan'; nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: I think I jinxed Sprint The internet is a lot less forgiving wrt outages then the telco. The telco can have a circut outage, re-route to another circuit, and the customer never sees an availability gap. Also, a total outage, during reduced traffic times, and no customer ever misses a dial-tone because they aren't trying to get one, is not an outage in telco terms. The internet, on the other hand, may have similar issues, unless we start talking streaming video, streaming audio, and voice over IP. In those cases, packet losses can make a serious mess of things. Also, congestion is treated differently between the two systems. Telcos will actually return a fast-busy when a switch becomes congested. The internet simply starts dropping packets. You can actually hear the latter when using www.dialpad.com or MS-Netmeeting (both of which, I use extensively).