From: "Jeff Young" <young@mci.net> gee bill, bucking for your own column in boardwatch again?

I'm afraid that I have no idea what you are talking about. To the best of my knowledge, I've never been offered a column in boardwatch. Of course, I've been paid to write articles for a number of magazines over the years.

our noc still does an exemplary job, thanks.

To summarize private reports, MCI NOC lost a fair number of its top technical staff when they "consolidated" their customer oriented NOCs into a single unit last year. Now, the folks answering the phone aren't well trained in Internet; instead they are telco oriented. I noticed that, too.

... we don't do maintenance in the middle of a sunday afternoon, unless of course, you were in australia at the time.

That explains why it took half a day to fix your routing problem. Maintenance shift must come on duty around 10 pm EDT, eh? And, of course, you've seen the note that you had a router down in Houston at about those times. Must be official policy not to "admit" outages.

you've been around long enough to know the drill, you call your upstream, he calls his, etc., etc.,

Actually, the "drill" is as follows: 1) makes sure it's not a problem with my upstream, that is singly homed to MCI. It wasn't. 2) since my upstream is singly homed, they have no interest in solving MCI routing problems, and refer all such calls to the MCI NOC. 3) in this case, since the other site was known to me, call them and see if they are experiencing a problem. Yes, they were having some problems with MCI, too. They are also singly homed. 4) traceroutes clearly showed that it was an MCI problem. 5) call MCI NOC with information. 6) get shrugged off with a recommendation that I send my problem to trouble@mci.com. This would be amazing if it were not so incredibly stupid, since it was my inability to get my email that brought the problem to my attention.

you expect our front line noc to know you by name?

Goodness gracious, while that personal touch can be pleasant, it is not required. But, I do expect them to have an idea what the IP addresses of their own routers are, and not have to go on hold to find out about traceroutes....

From: Sean Donelan <SEAN@SDG.DRA.COM> If you've been around long enough, you remember the days when the MCI NOC used to flat-out refuse to do inter-provider referals. .From first-hand experience, I know they've told their customers to call the other provider directly, even when both networks involved were direct MCI customers.

In my experience, most smaller NOCs refuse to do inter-provider referrals these days. Too many levels.

But I have accumulated a large collection of 1-800 numbers that I can use to call people I know by name :-). I prefer to go through channels, but when the channels don't work, I'm just as comfortable using any means necessary.

Same here. WSimpson@UMich.edu Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32 BSimpson@MorningStar.com Key fingerprint = 2E 07 23 03 C5 62 70 D3 59 B1 4F 5E 1D C2 C1 A2