On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Alex wrote:

As you all may recall, a little while I ago I started a thread about UBR at MAE-*-ATM. Since then, I've found http://www.mae.net/~feldman/presentations/NANOG-May99/mgp00006.html (which I must have missed).. Questions to WCom about this have been met with a nifty black-hole affect. Is there a demand for this? Do we want UBR?

Yes. The key would be getting the suggestion through to somebody that cares what the MAE customers want and can do something about it. I've asked repeatedly and also provided various people at Worldcom with a list of similar minded users of the MAE ATM services (which I developed from talking to people at prior NANOGs and via the phone). I did this both when Steve was there and after Steve's departure. Steve took me seriously and cared what users wanted. He also seemed to have a limited ability to put issues on the agenda for the MAE ATM engineering team. Your challenge is to find anybody that even remotely has this ability at Worldcom now. BTW, regarding previous a comment that the MAE ATM switches are configured to treat traffic in excess of the CBR PVC size as best effort; this is either not true or markedly different than the treatment of UBR. Evidence supporting this conclusion: 1) the MAE-WEST ATM switches and trunks are completely non saturated and 2) we have had several peers in the past that either responded slowly to PVC size increase requests or outright refused, which resulted in 3) packets dropping all over the floor going to and coming from our completely unsaturated port when we tried to increasing the PVC size different than what was in "peer maker" (heh). Based on my current impression that an anonymous marketing manager buried in Worldcom is the only one that has the ability to dictate anything new get implemented I would suggest you find that person and point out to them they are at a competitive disadvantage compared with the Pac Bell NAP and Ameritech NAP as the users there get more usage out of their connections (those exchanges carry more aggregate traffic due to all the PVCs being effectively wirespeed UBR (and allow for greater customer utilization with lower management costs)) which ends up translating to greater value to the customer which translates to greater willingness to pay for NAP service and related services. Yes, I know there is a network or two that sees great value in limiting access to their network across the MAE ATM exchanges, for the sake of this discussion of how to get something new assume those that either want to allways throttle their network to prevent attacks by limiting throughput continously or those that want to limit access to their network to the point of making you wish you where their customer so that you would have illusory recourse will still be able to use the existing CBR PVCs. i.e. configurable using peer maker. what a concept. hehehe... I certainly would appreciate any success you might have within my lifetime. Mike. +------------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -------------------+ | Mike Leber Direct Internet Connections Voice 510 580 4100 | | Hurricane Electric Web Hosting Colocation Fax 510 580 4151 | | mleber@he.net http://www.he.net | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+