OK, but large providers don't want to talk to small providers. It's a stated policy of many networks to refer a smaller customer/provider to their upstream. I only want to talk to someone who's competent

Heck, I only want to talk to someone who is competent too. However, I would not say there is a direct relationship between the size of a provider and the competency of its engineers. It has been my experience you are much more likely you get a clueless person with no authority to fix anything when you call a larger provider about a problem than when you call a smaller provider. Could a reason they get a lot of calls, is they are the root cause of a lot of problems? Even chaos has its reasons. The actual policy of many major networks seems to be to direct everyone to call someone else. The reason I call other providers is because the major providers/upstreams DO NOT do a good job of refering their customer's tickets between themselves even when I pay them money. I've been told by various major providers I should directly call another provider's NOC about a problem. In some cases both providers have been owned by the same corporation, but they refused to refer a trouble-ticket between their two NOCs. I don't have a way of knowing the types of quantity of inappropriate calls a typical larger ISP's NOC receives. I also don't know how many calls a typical larger ISP's NOC inappropriately blows off. If it takes me five phone calls to finally reach someone who understands the problem, AND has the authority to fix it, how do the NOC engineers count the previous four phone calls they ignored? If the upstream providers didn't tell their customers to call the other providers, and had better inter-NOC communications, perhaps fewer people would call other providers directly because they would know their own provider's NOC has better inter-NOC communication and could resolve the problem faster? If you have question about your electric bill, you call the electric company. If there are wires down and sparking in your front yard, you call 9-1-1 because they have better access to the electric company's emergency lines than you do.

My point is only that there is always a pecking order and by making network ops egalitarian you end up with a high signal/noise ratio, or worse yet, all the people who actually are relevant leave. (Witness NANOG: half the people from MCI etc. don't read any more)

I thought half the people from MCI left to join small startup companies :-) I wonder if they are now finding out just how difficult their former employer is to deal with now that they are on the outside looking in. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation