Discussion point: Telco quality?
This latest fiber cut just kind of jarred my brain into the realization of what "telco quality" services really boils down to. In the end, all services, both traditional telephony services and data services, are more alike than people give them credit for. :-) - paul
That is correct. Especially if you live in New York City. Our success rate lately on DS1 installs is around 30%. That's truly pathetic for the price paid. Add to that about a full day of calling various numbers of various CO clowns, and your install price has doubled. Now I've never had a problem with getting a $15/mo POTS line working on the first try... But then again it's not <sarcasm> "new" </sarcasm> technology like them thar DS1 lines. Charles On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Paul Ferguson wrote:
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 1998 19:21:19 -0400 From: Paul Ferguson <ferguson@cisco.com> To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Discussion point: Telco quality?
This latest fiber cut just kind of jarred my brain into the realization of what "telco quality" services really boils down to.
In the end, all services, both traditional telephony services and data services, are more alike than people give them credit for. :-)
- paul
=-----------------= = | Charles Sprickman Internet Channel | | INCH System Administration Team (212)243-5200 | | spork@inch.com access@inch.com | = =----------------=
At 08:04 PM 10/8/98 -0400, Charles Sprickman wrote:
Now I've never had a problem with getting a $15/mo POTS line working on the first try... But then again it's not <sarcasm> "new" </sarcasm> technology like them thar DS1 lines.
And there's the rub. It isn't like DS1's (or anything else for that matter) is any more "new" than they have ever been. - paul
Unnamed Administration sources reported that Paul Ferguson said:
And there's the rub. It isn't like DS1's (or anything else for that matter) is any more "new" than they have ever been.
Come on, Paul; of course T1's are new. They were first deployed in 1962. They won't be SOP for the telcos for another 15 years or so... -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433
At 08:31 PM 10/8/98 -0400, David Lesher wrote:
Come on, Paul; of course T1's are new. They were first deployed in 1962. They won't be SOP for the telcos for another 15 years or so...
Silly me. Having once worked for Sprint, I should have known better. Now that we've had a good laugh, any serious contributions? - paul
At 07:21 PM 10/8/98 -0400, Paul Ferguson wrote:
This latest fiber cut just kind of jarred my brain into the realization of what "telco quality" services really boils down to.
In the end, all services, both traditional telephony services and data services, are more alike than people give them credit for. :-)
When I first went from MCI to PacBell/ACN an of PacBell veteran picked up the hand-set and made me listen to it. He then asked me what I heard, I said "dial tone", he said, "No, what you heard was a freaking miracle!". At the time, our job was to make the new broadband HFC network as reliable, but cheaper, than the local-loop system. As it turned out, he was right. Building such a system, and keeping it running, decade after decade, *is* a freaking miracle! We had 10,000 customers before SBC pulled the plug. ___________________________________________________ Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993) e-mail: <mailto:rmeyer@mhsc.com>rmeyer@mhsc.com Internet phone: hawk.mhsc.com Personal web pages: <http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer>www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>www.mhsc.com/ ___________________________________________ I bet the human brain is a kludge. -- Marvin Minsky
Paul: Although the telcos talk a great deal about SONET rings and how reliable the telco circuits are and so forth its is surprising how few major Internet trunks are carried on SONET rings. And yet the Internet manages to carry on. Despite some local inconviences mot Internet users never notice these outages which goes to show how resilient the Internet really is. It begs the question then, if the Internet can work quite well today without all the supposed telco 99.99999+, do we really need telco "reliability" - SONET rings etc? As you know it is our contention that you don't need it. We believe that a 99.9999+ reliable Internet can be built without the underlying (supposedly "relaible") telco infrastructure. Bill ------------------------------------------- Bill St Arnaud Director Network Projects CANARIE bill.st.arnaud@canarie.ca http://tweetie.canarie.ca/~bstarn
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Paul Ferguson Sent: Thursday, October 08, 1998 7:21 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Discussion point: Telco quality?
This latest fiber cut just kind of jarred my brain into the realization of what "telco quality" services really boils down to.
In the end, all services, both traditional telephony services and data services, are more alike than people give them credit for. :-)
- paul
At 08:28 AM 10/9/98 -0400, Bill St. Arnaud wrote:
Although the telcos talk a great deal about SONET rings and how reliable the telco circuits are and so forth its is surprising how few major Internet trunks are carried on SONET rings. And yet the Internet manages to carry on. Despite some local inconviences mot Internet users never notice these outages which goes to show how resilient the Internet really is.
Funny you should mention this. Actually, aren't most data circuits (excluding copper pairs into the home) fed into the telco DACS network(s), which subsequently may be muxed into a fiber infrastructure along with traditional TDM voice traffic? The DACS network can certainly be an overlay on a fiber infrastructure, and usually is just that. This kind of reminds me of a discussion I have had with several folks on a couple of occasions on the issue of VPN's. To make a long story short, one of the important roles of a VPN is to provide some sort of segmentation of traffic, and this can be achieved at virtually any layer of the protocol stack -- even the physical layer. An example of this sort of segmentation could be either a timing slot in a SONET pipe or even a separate wavelength in a WDM system. And in most cases, at the lowest levels, you have voice and data traffic riding the same light rails anyway, like ships in the night. You get the idea. Discussions on true optical networking aside, for the moment anyway. It is no surprise that both voice & data services are affected by fiber cuts.
It begs the question then, if the Internet can work quite well today without all the supposed telco 99.99999+, do we really need telco "reliability" - SONET rings etc?
This kind of reminds me of Bullwinkle trying to pull a rabbit out of his hat. "Nothing up my sleeve..... Presto!" I don't think it is quite that straightforward. You first need to ask yourself, "What problem am I trying to solve?"
As you know it is our contention that you don't need it. We believe that a 99.9999+ reliable Internet can be built without the underlying (supposedly "relaible") telco infrastructure.
Define "reliable". Well, my observation is that the principle difference in reliability between the "traditional" voice network (PSTN) and "traditional" data services is in how the underlying delivery services are fundamentally designed. This is just a byproduct -- a fundamental difference in the underlying technologies -- circuit-switching vs. packet-switching. Each were designed with different constraints in mind. Let's not forget that IP is a connectionless, store-and-forward, datagram delivery mechanism. The remainder of this exercise is left to the reader. - paul
Paul Ferguson said:
Funny you should mention this. Actually, aren't most data circuits (excluding copper pairs into the home) fed into the telco DACS network(s), which subsequently may be muxed into a fiber infrastructure along with traditional TDM voice traffic? The DACS network can certainly be an overlay on a fiber infrastructure, and usually is just that.
I don't recall the exact figure, but something like 50% of US circuits are on SONET rings. So yes, the voice and data traffic are equally effected. However, on older non-SONET networks the carriers have a "hot circuit switch" technology that will switch voice circuits in the event of a fiber cut. However, most data circuits do not have such protection. Private data networks are severly affected by fiber cuts, but the Internet is less affected because of its own intrinsic self healing protocols.
Define "reliable".
Good point. Many carriers and telco manufacturers are coming to the Internet business saying that we have the knowledge and expertise to build 99.99999+ reliable networks - therefore eventually we are going to take over the business. Reliable is easy to define in terms of voice calls. But it has whole different set of meanings in the IP world, which most carriers and telco manufacturers fail to understand. For example I can have a 99.9999+ SONET network, but if I can't access my DNS root server, then I clearly don't have a reliable network. Bill
At 09:46 AM 10/9/98 -0400, Bill St. Arnaud wrote:
Define "reliable".
Good point. Many carriers and telco manufacturers are coming to the Internet business saying that we have the knowledge and expertise to build 99.99999+ reliable networks - therefore eventually we are going to take over the business. Reliable is easy to define in terms of voice calls. But it has whole different set of meanings in the IP world, which most carriers and telco manufacturers fail to understand. For example I can have a 99.9999+ SONET network, but if I can't access my DNS root server, then I clearly don't have a reliable network.
Bingo. - paul
At 10:01 AM 10/9/98 -0400, Paul Ferguson wrote:
At 09:46 AM 10/9/98 -0400, Bill St. Arnaud wrote:
Define "reliable".
Good point. Many carriers and telco manufacturers are coming to the Internet business saying that we have the knowledge and expertise to build 99.99999+ reliable networks - therefore eventually we are going to take over the business. Reliable is easy to define in terms of voice calls. But it has whole different set of meanings in the IP world, which most carriers and telco manufacturers fail to understand. For example I can have a 99.9999+ SONET network, but if I can't access my DNS root server, then I clearly don't have a reliable network.
Bingo.
Yes, the answer is to run your own root-server, a la GRS. ___________________________________________________ Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993) e-mail: <mailto:rmeyer@mhsc.com>rmeyer@mhsc.com Internet phone: hawk.mhsc.com Personal web pages: <http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer>www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>www.mhsc.com/ ___________________________________________ I bet the human brain is a kludge. -- Marvin Minsky
At 07:21 PM 10/8/98 -0400, Paul Ferguson wrote:
This latest fiber cut just kind of jarred my brain into the realization of what "telco quality" services really boils down to.
Actually, telco quality is not a positive thing at all in my mind: - Circuits costing 40K/month take errors and are mysteriously "cleared while testing" or better yet, there's "no trouble found" and the errors go away all by themselves. - MUX software upgrades that should have caused "several 50ms hits", takes out 10Mbps of bandwidth for 12 hours. - FOC dates that are more like guidlines. - Having LECs and IXCs that finger point at each other's legs of a circuit when there's a problem. - Two words: unmanned terminal. And it's not limited to the data services... - Getting the infamous "all circuits are busy" or a fast busy when trying to complete a call. - The static filled line that used to be clear until the PacBell truck came a prowlin. Considering about 97% of our data network outages are caused by the telcos, I shudder when I hear that Lucent wants to make my data network as reliable as the voice network. I can only hope that the current trend of realistic SLAs makes it to the carriers, instead of the current "well if it's down for a couple of days _maybe_ we'll refund some money to you if you beat us up really bad." </rant> :) -Geoff ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Geoff Lisk Phone: 415-228-4170 Network Engineer E-mail:glisk@digisle.net Digital Island Pager: glisk@airnote.net One hop to the world... www.digisle.net ----------------------------------------------------------------------
At 01:03 AM 10/11/98 -0700, Geoff Lisk wrote:
I can only hope that the current trend of realistic SLAs makes it to the carriers, instead of the current "well if it's down for a couple of days _maybe_ we'll refund some money to you if you beat us up really bad."
But that *is* the current SLA trend, and has been for years. - paul
On Sun, 11 Oct 1998, Geoff Lisk wrote:
Considering about 97% of our data network outages are caused by the telcos, I shudder when I hear that Lucent wants to make my data network as reliable as the voice network.
Data point. We recently had GTE erroneously delete a circuit so completely that they couldnt find it in *any* of their records. Had to have a lineman go out on site and physically trace the circuit back to the CO. Took them 12 hours to get the circuit back up. "Telco quality" my ass. -Dan
On Sun, 11 Oct 1998, Dan Hollis wrote:
On Sun, 11 Oct 1998, Geoff Lisk wrote:
Considering about 97% of our data network outages are caused by the telcos, I shudder when I hear that Lucent wants to make my data network as reliable as the voice network.
Data point. We recently had GTE erroneously delete a circuit so completely that they couldnt find it in *any* of their records. Had to have a lineman go out on site and physically trace the circuit back to the CO. Took them 12 hours to get the circuit back up.
"Telco quality" my ass.
Heh. Try these: http://www.forest.net/advanced/isp/gtesucks1.html Regards, Chris ____________________________________________________________________ Chris Kilbourn System Administrator digital.forest kilbo@forest.net 425.483.0483 http://www.forest.net Macintosh Internet Services Since 1994.
participants (8)
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Bill St. Arnaud -
Charles Sprickman -
Chris Kilbourn -
Dan Hollis -
David Lesher -
Geoff Lisk -
Paul Ferguson -
Roeland M.J. Meyer