Agreed. End users should never be calling outside their ISP; it is NOT their place to solve problems for their ISP, for multiple reasons, one of which is that if any of our customers worked directly with MCI, for example, to solve a problem they saw that we were not yet aware of, and they and MCI solved the issue without involving us, we'd have no realization that a problem had been developing.

Unfortunately there is no good trouble ticket referral system between providers. I've had MCI (acting as my provider) close MCI tickets and tell me to call the other provider directly because "it was not a MCI problem." Since MCI wasn't going to handle the trouble referral for me, I didn't have a choice but bypass MCI and contact the other ISP directly. If providers accepted trouble tickets and did inter-provider trouble referral, I would love to let them handle it. I didn't want to 'go around' my provider, my provider wanted me to go around them. BTW, the internet-draft for 'Responsible Network Management Guidelines' is now in the internet-drafts directory <draft-donelan-netmgt-guidelines.txt>. This is commonsense stuff folks, please don't wait until a disaster happens before you do something. I was pleased to read in the news BBNplanet has announced plans to implement a customer communications system to keep customers informed during major network problems. One ISP down, 7,200 to go. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation