At 11:56 AM 10/14/96 -0400, Curtis Villamizar wrote:

If we hold BBN to the same standards that the telco industry uses to come up with 99.999%, BBN was up but "a few customers" experienced a localized outage.

Discussion of reliability standards has gotten a little vague. To throw some facts into the confusion: I once managed to beat our Telco reps hard enough for them to provide actual numbers. This was after a 4 hour outage on an OC-3 ring that "could self heal in 50 milliseconds." Ameritech provided the usual mushroom treatment, but MFS actually quoted their Operations procedure AP2402, which says: For a DS3 facility 0-50 miles: Availability on a 12 month period is 99.997% Error free seconds > 99.992% over 24 hour period (7 seconds/day) Bit error rate < 2.5*10E-11 "Performance tests shall be conducted at DS-3 level for 72 hours." Apparently this is copied from AT&T PUB 62411. Cisco gives me the mushroom treatment, but assuming they shoot for something like 99.992% uptime, a simple DS3 Internet connection could have no better than 99.98% reliability. Does anyone even come close to this number? With all of the ATM deployed recently, I cant imagine any ISP even comes close. Steve Norton 312-496-4601 VP Operations 312-496-4499 (fax) InterAccess Co steve@noc.interaccess.com