IP: Re: the freeway is jamming up [ with an editorial comment

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

From: Hal Varian <hal () alfred sims berkeley edu>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 96 11:32:46 -0700
To: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>


You wrote:
> We had mechanisms for measuring the grade
> of service offered to the customer and standards which had to be met else
> our tarrifs suffered.


I think that this is a key point.  Here are two (small) steps that might help:


1) Build user-friendly front ends to ping, netstat, and traceroute
that can be used on (groan) Windows systems.  One simple, useful tool would be 
a  ping with batch mode, where you give it a list of IP addresses that you
commonly access and it reports back a "rating" of average times to access
the sites *you* are interested.  The point is that these tools should be  
simple enough so that end users can evaluate competing Internet service  
providers on something other than marketing claims.


2) Build a Web site (the Better Bit Bureau?) for reporting the results  
gathered by (1) so that users can communicate good and bad performance
statistics and stories.


I think that once the end users have tools that help them evaluate service  
providers we will see significant improvements.



---
Hal Varian, Dean           voice: 510-642-9980
SIMS, 102 South Hall       fax:   510-642-5814
University of California   hal () sims berkeley edu
Berkeley, CA 94720-4600    http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal