On Mon, 6 May 1996, Christian Nielsen wrote:
We feel this is a 'Good' thing. For example, there are two companies with DS3's in Utah. One goes up and down the other stays up all the time. Which one do you think we go with? Also, there are many companies that think they can be a 'high speed/T1/T3/OC48' provider and not know what they are doing. The week will get weeded out. And the ones who know what they are doing will stay around.
Your point seems logicaly valid, but the example you use only serves to prove points other than what you intended. The 'up and down' you speak of had nothing to do with anything inside of Utah or with Mom-n-Pop ISP. They all occured within a major NSP. (name witheld to avoid finger pointing) The problems also had nothing to do with technical incompetence on the part of the NSP or ISP. Here is a list from recent memory: 1. Hssi card dies 2. Route processor dies. 3. weird BGP route propigation bug in cisco IOS 4. 7513 dies (exact reason unspecified) 5. Farmer in california plows up fiber. -- this says three things to me -- i. s**t happens. ii. Even a very large NSP with a competent staff, good equipment, and lots of experience with >= T3 connections, CAN and DO have problems. Hence the current thread on the need for standard email addresses. iii. Mabey Bob Metcalfe is partaliy right, (not on the Chicken Little -- sky is falling stuff,) but on the need to educate the masses who are swarming to their nearest Internet POP. The Internet is still not the place for mission critical (I hate that word) applications. If your business depends on 100% availablity, then you are in the wrong business. Could it be that the Internet is going through a growth process similar to what the telephone industry went through. Although I am not old enough to remember, I have heard there was a time when it was quite unreliable. Why does the present US phone system work as well as it does? Was it federal mandates on quality of service? Was it the MaBell monopoly? I fear that senator Hatch from Utah is going to get up one morning and not be able to surf, and conjure up a bill saying that the Internet shall lose no more than one web page in 1 million end to end by 1998. ;) - djs