On Mon, 31 January 2000, "dave o'leary" wrote:

Attempts to "standardize" inter-NOC communication happened a couple of times in the early 90's in the IETF, but it got too ugly, with too many barriers (basically people not wanting to expose dirty laundry). I fear that attempts to do so now when the providers are *really* competing with each other (as opposed to back in the old daze when we were all friends :-) will suffer the same fate, other than on a pairwise basis between NOCs that cooperate well with each other anyway.

According to a Telcordia survey of 25 "nontraditional" communication companies (ISPs, wireless, cable, etc) 82% of the respondents said they informed customers about outages and service degradation. If this number seems high, remember this is a self-reported survey, not neccessarily what actually happens when a company has a severe problem with their network. About 40% of the respondants said they informed industry groups and other companies about the most severe and selected other problems. Again, based on self-reporting. One interesting statistic was about 5% of the survey sample said they didn't even tell other people in their own company about severe outages or degradations of service. I'm guessing this was a statistical artifact, like the 5% of voters who report they don't know for whom they voted when asked in exit polls on election day. But maybe some companies really don't tell even other parts of the same company when they have a problem. Note: the survey was completed on July 9, 1999; and may not reflect changes in company policies after major outages since last summer.