-----Original Message----- From: Steve Gibbard [mailto:scg@gibbard.org] Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2004 12:30 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: How relable does the Internet need to be? (Was: Re: Converged Network Threat)

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So, it appears that among general infrastructure we depend on, there are probably the following reliability thresholds:

Employees not being able to get to work due to snow: two to three days per year. Berkeley storm sewers: overflow two to three days per year. Residential Electricity: out two to three hours per year. Cell phone service: Somewhat better than nine fives of reliability ;) Landline phone service: I haven't noticed an outage on my home lines in a few years. Natural gas: I've never noticed an outage.

How Internet service fits into that of course depends on how you're accessing the Net. The T-Mobile GPRS card I got recently seems significantly less reliable than my cell phone. My SBC DSL line is almost to the reliability level of my landline phone or natural gas service, except that the DSL router in my basement doesn't work when electric power is out. I'm probably poorly qualified to talk about the end-user experience on the networks I actually work on, even if I had permission to. Like pretty much everybody else here, I'm always interested in doing better on reliability. And, like many of my neighbors, I'd like to be able to store stuff on my basement floor. In comparison to a lot of other infrastructure we depend on, it seems to me the Internet is already doing pretty well.

-Steve

With BPL on the horizon and the Electric Utils looking to de-regulate in some areas, it will be interesting to watch infrastructure adapt accordingly. I think the Internet is doing pretty well save some IOS code problems from time to time, and the typical root server hicups. Dee