At the risk of starting a debate that will go nowhere and annoy the readership... On 3/28/2003 at 14:44:00 -0500, Sean Donelan said:

I guess we'll have to wait for Allegiance customers "leak" the information. The leaks may not be as accurate as if the information came directly from Allegiance. Other providers such as AT&T, Earthlink, MFN, RCN have a different philosophy about providing information concerning their network status. Not all NOC's are the same.

I seriously doubt that, if a 12-year-old from Nebraska called the NOC at AT&T and asked for a list of all their network failures in the past two years, the NOC person would feel obliged to spend their time on it. Furthermore, if that NOC tech could be helping to fix the problem, and I were a customer, I'd be upset that he is wasting time chatting on the phone with a non-customer. NOCs have limited resources. More importantly, they often don't know what's wrong until after it was fixed, and sharing what may be a wrong assessment with people who have no vested interest in the problem is asking for a lot more trouble, especially since they probably will never know or care what the real solution was. -Dave