On Wed, 19 Aug 1998, Alex Bligh wrote:

Does anyone care about trying to get packet loss over MAE-East reduced any more? Some peers have quite heavy packet loss to them from where I'm sitting, and have done for a good while. It seems to me it's not a problem with my port, and I don't think I have head of line blocking problems, which means it's either a Gigaswitch problem, or their ports are simply full. Does anyone still hassle Worldcom and peers about this or have we lost hope of ever getting it fixed (i.e. people peer privately or hope other exchange points or a replacement will come along).

My attempts at getting answers out of them were responded with "we are aware of the problem" "we are *trying* to add more capacity" "we cant give you any completion dates". Of course, this was a few months ago. I'm not sure what the problem is. Modern ethernet/packet switches claim to handle 20-40 Gbits/s. MAE-WEST is peaking around 1.65 Gbits/s. If the Gigaswitch has reached the end of its useful life at the MAEs..... replace them. So who is signing up for the MAE-WEST/EAST ATM service? We're considering it, but MFS wont tell us who else is considering it. Kind of makes it hard to sign a 3 year contract with no idea if there will be other people to peer with.