On Thu, 21 May 1998, Karl Denninger wrote:

On Thu, May 21, 1998 at 12:44:11AM -0400, John Fraizer - Administrator wrote:

...

Lets see how they are performing today, shall we? [somebox]:~# traceroute customer.of.blah-12345-we-are-a-nap.net

[snip]

...

Wow. Now, that's some lightning speed. <sic> And NOW, lets look at someone with a real Tier One provider: [somebox]:~# traceroute www.mcs.net traceroute: Warning: Multiple interfaces found; using x.x.x.x @ eth0 traceroute to www.mcs.net (205.164.8.12), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 (Default Gateway) (x.x.x.1) 0.495 ms 0.415 ms 0.385 ms 2 (Tier One provider) (x.x.x.21) 2.424 ms 1.630 ms 1.529 ms 3 aads.good.net (198.32.130.49) 15.131 ms 13.261 ms 13.930 ms 4 mcsnet.chicago.good.net (207.98.189.130) 14.775 ms 15.296 ms 16.193 ms 5 www.mcs.net (205.164.8.12) 14.592 ms 14.750 ms 14.504 ms BTW: Karl, lightning fast as always to your site.

Then again, my background and engineering efforts have been geared towards the Fortune-50 marketplace and OLTP environments where ANY packet loss or significant hysteresis in the transport times is considered unacceptable.

Seems to depend on where you sit. John is only a few hops away (on the same 'Tier 1' provider?) as Karl, so traffic is dependant on only three parties maintaining a clean network. Across another backbone (via public view sage.aspire.net) it's not so clean, probably due to packet loss across the Tier 1 provider that they use (UUNet) or loss at an exchange point between UUNet and Napnet to get to Karl's network. ----205.164.8.12 PING Statistics---- 15 packets transmitted, 13 packets received, 13% packet loss round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 40/52/190 Meanwhile, it's clean from where I sit: ----205.164.8.12 PING Statistics---- 21 packets transmitted, 21 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 85/96/299 and Aspire is clean from here: ----sage.aspire.net PING Statistics---- 16 packets transmitted, 16 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 23/30/54 but I see loss from NetAxs to me: ----199.184.165.2 PING Statistics---- 24 packets transmitted, 22 packets received, 8% packet loss round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 29/48/70 while it's clean from NetAxs to MCS: ----www.mcs.net PING Statistics---- 17 packets transmitted, 17 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 22/26/37 Despite our best intentions, packet loss and delay will always exists from our networks to certain destinations, no matter whether we use 'Tier 1' providers or companies that are creating private NAPs of their own. And how it looks from me to you doesn't mean much, in the long run - how it looks across the board from you to your customer's destinations is what makes a difference. If that's accomplished with a small backbone provider, a big player like MCI, or some local 'private nap' company shouldn't make any difference to anyone but yourself. SGA