Re: UBR at MAE-East ATM, anyone? (fwd)

[Mike Leber <mleber () he net>]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Alex wrote:
> As you all may recall, a little while I ago I started a thread about UBR
> at MAE-*-ATM.
> Since then, I've found
> http://www.mae.net/~feldman/presentations/NANOG-May99/mgp00006.html (which
> I must have missed).. Questions to WCom about this have been met with a
> nifty black-hole affect.
> Is there a demand for this? Do we want UBR?

Yes.  The key would be getting the suggestion through to somebody that
cares what the MAE customers want and can do something about it. 

I've asked repeatedly and also provided various people at Worldcom with a
list of similar minded users of the MAE ATM services (which I developed
from talking to people at prior NANOGs and via the phone). I did this both
when Steve was there and after Steve's departure.  Steve took me seriously
and cared what users wanted.  He also seemed to have a limited ability to
put issues on the agenda for the MAE ATM engineering team.  Your challenge
is to find anybody that even remotely has this ability at Worldcom now.

BTW, regarding previous a comment that the MAE ATM switches are configured
to treat traffic in excess of the CBR PVC size as best effort; this is
either not true or markedly different than the treatment of UBR.  Evidence
supporting this conclusion: 1) the MAE-WEST ATM switches and trunks are
completely non saturated and 2) we have had several peers in the past that
either responded slowly to PVC size increase requests or outright refused,
which resulted in 3) packets dropping all over the floor going to and
coming from our completely unsaturated port when we tried to increasing
the PVC size different than what was in "peer maker" (heh).

Based on my current impression that an anonymous marketing manager buried
in Worldcom is the only one that has the ability to dictate anything new
get implemented I would suggest you find that person and point out to them
they are at a competitive disadvantage compared with the Pac Bell NAP and
Ameritech NAP as the users there get more usage out of their connections
(those exchanges carry more aggregate traffic due to all the PVCs being
effectively wirespeed UBR (and allow for greater customer utilization with
lower management costs)) which ends up translating to greater value to the
customer which translates to greater willingness to pay for NAP service
and related services.

Yes, I know there is a network or two that sees great value in limiting
access to their network across the MAE ATM exchanges, for the sake of this
discussion of how to get something new assume those that either want to
allways throttle their network to prevent attacks by limiting throughput
continously or those that want to limit access to their network to the
point of making you wish you where their customer so that you would have
illusory recourse will still be able to use the existing CBR PVCs.  i.e.
configurable using peer maker.  what a concept. 

hehehe...  I certainly would appreciate any success you might have within
my lifetime.

Mike.

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