Original message <199601310545.XAA14185@westie.gi.net> From: Alan Hannan <alan@gi.net> Date: Jan 30, 23:45 Subject: Re: misinformation and rumors from MCI

Matthem,

I read your letter with a bit of a frown.

...

Please, in the future, send this mail to the person's manager, not to the NANOG mail list. People make mistakes, obviously he made one, and I don't see any reason to drag them/him through the coals.

We've seen this same sort of misinformation propogated by people at the major NSPs for some time now,... the people who know what interconnects really are and what routing policy really is read this list, and their understanding of the technology is presumably well-respected in their organization. If the major NSPs really want small providers to stay around to handle the end-user sales, they're going to have to adopt that attitude comapny-wide, and perhaps the technical people could write up an FAQ or two for their sales staff so that misinformation like this doesn't repeatedly end up in my mailbox, coming from customers who think that WE'RE the ones who lied. This was just yet another "I heard this about you from MCI and they must know what they're talking about" and I thought it might be informative for the readers of this list to see what's being said out there. There's a difference between a mistake and a corporate attitude of "drag all the small guys through the mud by claiming that their connectivity sucks by waving around technical terms". And sure, if nobody else thought this was interesting, I'll be sure to not mention this sort of thing on this list again... no need to waste everyone's valuable mail reading time :) -matthew kaufman matthew@scruz.net