On Fri, 21 Apr 1995, Vadim Antonov wrote:
It seems to me that this education is one of the services that small ISPs ought to expect of their national service providers.
Huh? Where did you see "education" in terms of service contracts?
If a person goes in the business it is assumed that (s)he knows the profession. It is certainly not the case for many US-based Internet service providers.
In today's world of exponential Internet growth, I don't think it is practically feasible to expect any significant percentage of ISP's to _know_the_business_ before they get into it.
Conversely, it seems that the rest of the community ought to expect that national service providers will be responsible for educating their customers, (e.g., ISPs).
Sounds kind of over-expectant. Considering that even large service providers have real bad problems with finding engineers who know what they are doing.
Yes, it is over-expectant to think that the national service providers should provide direct one-to-one training for their customers. On the other hand, as a small ISP who *WANTS* to learn and *WANTS* to know how things work before diving in, I must say that it has not been that easy finding the written materials at a tutorial level to learn this stuff. I have, however, found quite a lot of written materials out there on the net that help to some degree. I know that among ISP's I am the exception rather than the rule and although I would like to pass on some of this information to other new ISP's through some of the lists we are on, the material I have is not well organized enough to easily present it to others. If some of the operations folks could scrape together some resources to collect these materials into a coherent web site as an introduction to Internet operations, I'm sure many ISP's would be grateful for the chance to learn. Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-549-1036 Network Operations Fax: +1-604-542-4130 Okanagan Internet Junction Internet: michael@junction.net http://www.junction.net - The Okanagan's 1st full-service Internet provider