On Fri, 26 May 2000, Martin Cooper wrote:
INSnet (admittedly not a tier-1) has a pretty neat policy on disclosure, even including a detailed description of the fixes for problems as well as the causes of them, which is nice.
Essentially all of the top, tier-2, tier-3, etc providers have some type of online network status web site. How well they use it to keep users of their network informed varies greatly. Abovenet - Web site with MRTG graphs, and copies of messages from their tech contact mailing list about problems, outages, and scheduled maintenance. AGIS - no more. Closed access to their network status web site years ago. AOL - I don't know, I haven't found anything on their public web site. AT&T - Network status web site with red, yellow, green city to city matrix. Outage portion of the web site is never updated. Worldnet only newsgroups frequently updated with detailed problem reports. C&W - Traffic web site (red, yellow, green), but I've noticed they seem to only have "green" dots on the front map. You have to dig to find the problem sites. Has an outage mailing list, but it never has any mail and even C&W employees seem unsure of its purpose. Exodus - BENGI web site with major trouble tickets available. Genuity/GTEI/BBN - customer only network status web site. "Finger" access to trouble tickets, including master tickets. Good proactive notification of customers of problems. Globalcenter - customer only web site. Mindspring - Mindspring has a public network status web site with current trouble tickets. PSI - used to have a detailed "finger" and web site network status page, starting last month I get an access denied message. SBC/PBI - Web site with current network status. Frequently updated and includes resolution or reason for outage. Sprint - Has a web site describing scheduled and emergency maintenance mailing lists. Scheduled maintenance mailing list has some messages, but I've never seen a message about an outage on the emergency maintenance list. UUNET - web site updated for some major outages. Says details will follow, but usually the entire web page is "refreshed" to all systems normal message every few hours whether or not the problem is fixed. Some customers reportly received mail messages about outages.