Re: Westnet and Utah outage

[Edward Henigin <ed () texas net>]

        Other people have touched on it, but I'd like to re-iterate:

        The quality that someone can expect out of their Internet connection,
as a practical matter, will somewhat vary with how much they're willing to
pay.  It seems to me that giving someone <<1% downtime is an expensive
level of service.  The Internet market today is not one where most customers
question the providers on the level of service; quite contrarily they
question the providers on how cheap they can go.  This type of market
will be cost driven, and for my $19.95 unlimited PPP account, do you think
my ISP will be able to give me <<1% inaccessibility?  Not without operating in
the red, I don't think.

        I think most ISP's would be *delighted* to offer customers
Very High Quality service, but few customers are willing to pay for that
service.  As a result, the final judgement of "how good is good enough"
will be "whatever the customer can live with," as compared to anything
that engineers like (ie 1%, 5%, etc).

        Ed
        ed () texas net

        (p.s. you notice I'm brushing aside the first question, being
"how do I *measure* the quality of service."  Offhand, a weighted average
of all of the components that a given customer needs for a connection
makes the most sense to me.)


--
On Tue, 28 Nov 1995 joliveto () cwi net wrote:

> Hans;
>
> Sorry...I waited for additional replies but you seemed to be the only one to 
> take my bait.  My question was rhetorical.  
>
> I hear all this complaining on this forum about unacceptable delay and packet 
> loss by the ISP Community yet no "respected" industry standards body has yet 
> set QOS guidelines for ISP's!  An old management dictum says "if its 
> important, measure it".
>
> I know where to look for QOS criteria on my physical plant (T1/DS3's), I even 
> know where to look for QOS criteria for my old X.25 network.  If we want 
> things to get better w/i the ISP Community...let's define what better is.
>
> - jeff -