10% packet loss is quite within the normal range of parameters for a packet switching network such as the Internet.
Well, I don't think I will need to be reminded not to buy Internet service from your organization. Here is a bit of context. At home I am a beta site for the PSI Internet service via cable TV. I generally use a computer at Harvard University to read my mail. Although the Harvard network is about 1.5 miles away from my house the sparse distribution of connections between Internet service providers and the current routing policies mean that packets from my house to Harvard take 20 hops and go through San Francisco and packets from Harvard to my house, (also 20 hops) go through Washington DC. Here are the results of some reliability tests I just ran. from my house to San Francisco via PSI Net: 209 packets transmitted, 209 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 99.996/268.978/983.334 ms from Harvard to Washington DC via BBN Planet and MCI 204 packets transmitted, 204 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 16/46/249 from my house to Harvard via PSI, MAE-west, MCI, BBN Planet and back via BBN Planet, MCI, MAE-east and PSI. 505 packets transmitted, 497 packets received, 1% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 116.702/192.69/3000 ms (Note this is being tested at a time when Harvard's service provider (BBN planet) is busily working on one of the links in its backbone because they do not think the quality is high enough.) I consider it a problem when the loss exceeds 1% through this long path - as do the people who run the networks that my traffic passes through. The normal loss through this path is less than 1% and, much of the time it is 0.
But nothing is broken. There is no inter-ISP level.
It is so much easier to just say it is the other guy's problem. Hans-Werner suggests that most phone companies do not take this attitude, lucky for some of us, not all Internet "service" providers do. Scott (just in case you might think I'm off on some other world, there are other paths I could have used which would have shown far higher loss, those paths would have gone through service providers who apparently feel the way that the person quoted here does or who are unable to make the investment in their infrastructure warranted by the level of traffic their customers would like to exchange.)
from my house to Harvard via PSI, MAE-west, MCI, BBN Planet and back via BBN Planet, MCI, MAE-east and PSI.
505 packets transmitted, 497 packets received, 1% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 116.702/192.69/3000 ms
I suspect that you are going out via the CIX-SMDS cloud, not MAE-East - PSI is not on MAE-West. I also suspect that if/when you have packet loss it is due to the shared FDDI at MAE-East. PSI (along with several other service providers) is on the shared FDDI at MAE-East. The MAE-East shared FDDI is quite overloaded (it hits 90 Meg during the day). [The MAE-East Gigaswitch is humming along quite nicely at a total of just over 190 Meg during the day.] The shared FDDI participants at MAE-East are: Shared FDDI 192.41.177.6 wtn9-mae_east-ce.sura.net Shared FDDI 192.41.177.7 (unknown) (down) Shared FDDI 192.41.177.75 mae-east.iconnet.net Shared FDDI 192.41.177.95 mae-east.delphi.com Shared FDDI 192.41.177.110 mae-east.ibm.com Shared FDDI 192.41.177.140 mae-east.ans.net Shared FDDI 192.41.177.163 (unknown) Shared FDDI 192.41.177.243 gsl-mae-e-fddi1/0.gsl.net Shared FDDI 192.41.177.245 mae-east.psi.net Check out the MFS MAE-East/West web pages at http://www.mfsdatanet/MAE/ for this and other data. There are daily graphs of traffic and a list of the connections to each MAE (showing how each provider is connected). --asp@uunet.uu.net (Andrew Partan)
Check out the MFS MAE-East/West web pages at http://www.mfsdatanet/MAE/
Oops - looks like I forgot the .com. Try this instead: http://www.mfsdatanet.com/MAE/ --asp@uunet.uu.net (Andrew Partan)
On Sat, 4 Nov 1995, Scott Bradner wrote:
10% packet loss is quite within the normal range of parameters for a packet switching network such as the Internet.
Well, I don't think I will need to be reminded not to buy Internet service from your organization.
Why not? We don't run the Internet, we just connect people to it. And our 10Mbps fibre ATM link rarely gets to 25% utilization.
I consider it a problem when the loss exceeds 1% through this long path - as do the people who run the networks that my traffic passes through. The normal loss through this path is less than 1% and, much of the time it is 0.
momentary samples such as yours are meaningless. One moment you can have 0% loss, the next moment 10%. I will agree that sustained high loss levels are not acceptable, but isolated ping measurements do not measure that.
But nothing is broken. There is no inter-ISP level.
It is so much easier to just say it is the other guy's problem. Hans-Werner suggests that most phone companies do not take this attitude,
I disagree. If you get busy signals or recorded messages from a telco other than the one who provides your local phone service, the most they will do is to promise you that they will look into it and/or inform the company whose service appears to be the problem. This is all any ISP can do when a customer complains that ISP X is not reachable or that ISP X's site appears to be overloaded. I am talking about ISP's here, not NSP's. Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022 Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-542-4130 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com
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Scott Bradner