Hola,
I'm amazed at the attitude I'm getting from this list. You are, collectively, in the business of running a large network. I am a paying user of that network. The network is not delivering appropriate performance, as measured most importantly by the time I and others spend waiting around for characters to echo, Web pages to display, and whatnot. This time is long far more often than it's historically been, and far more often than a reasonable person might expect.
Good paragraph.... Unfortuantely, I believe you have missed some fundamental importancy below...
So I complain, and suggest that you should look into reducing network growth to a level you can really manage, and setting standards of performance for yourselves and one another.
It's all in the economics. The profit/supply/demand of the free market has dictated that where it is is where it should be.
Do you say "Yes, that's a good idea"? No.
Because I/we don't think it is. The applications and users feed the network. Demand increases capacity. Ideally/expectedly the capacity planning is done maturely enough that the network is built to meet the demand. But this demand is rather large. People don't foresee properly. Even when they do they ignore hoping to increase their stretched profit margins.
Do you say "No, that won't work because <x>"?
Erm, maybe I missed something, but I don't see your Add Water solution to the problem. Are you suggesting we limit customers that have access to the Internet?
No. Do you say "We think we have a handle on the problem, and you can expect it to go away soon"?. No.
I hope not. The problem you are seeing is an example of one or two (or maybe more) poorly connected AS entities. With providers like that, the rest of the net looks really good. I don't accept your premise that the majority of the net is broked.
Do you say "We don't think we can make the problem go away no matter what we do, so we'll try to do a better job of explaining the expected level of service to new users (and to old users who are losing the level of service they've been used to)?". No.
No, because the Internet exists just like the global ecology. If the fools in the neighboring state want to take everyone's garbage, we'd love to give it to them. Err, my analogy is false, but the point is that the "Internet" isn't broked. Certain parts of the Internet are, and it's because they choose to be. Imply a sociological analogy. Do we say that the United States is broked because we've 4% unemployment? Because we've X murders / year?
Do you refer me to some existing document, prepared either by my own ISP or by NANOG or some other group, describing the quality of service I'm to expect, and point out to me that what I'm asking for is more than it guarantees? No.
Actually, I will. Your contract. What, it doesn't say anything on there about quality of service? Well, why not?
As far as I can tell, nobody's acknowledged that there's a problem. You really seem to believe that the quality of service provided over the Internet as a whole, as opposed to within any particular provider's network, is acceptable.
Indeed. I look forward to your definition of the Internet. Contributions to benchmarking the performance of the "internet" can be directed to the IPPM mailing list... [...]
I think there's a big difference between complaining about a connection "not [being] 100% perfect" and complaining about a huge packet loss rate making a path (and indeed all paths between me and at least one very major network) nearly unusable. There's even more of a difference between complaining about a single incident of such a loss rate and complaining about a pervasive pattern of such incidents.
But, you see, this is not our problem. It is the contributor of the loss's problem. There exist paths that do not have this problem. [...]
Having seen similar problems all too often in the past, and having heard complaints about such problems from other users, I feel justified in recommending that an industry group, presumably concerned with quality of service, consider the matter.
Well, it is an election year. Perhaps you can get the whole thing regulated by a federal oversight committee. That will really solve all the problems. Or you could get another provider, and encourage the sites connected to poor providers to change as well. It's a free market. It's not designed to provide for the common welfare. It's designed to reward the quick thinking and resourceful. It's designed to endorse Darwinism. In order to have networks succeed, you must have networks fail. Networks that fail will lose customers and decrease their potential to attract new ones. It's all well documented in many economics textbooks. -alan