[92043] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: BCP Question: Handling trouble reports from non-customers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Abley)
Fri Sep 1 21:41:49 2006
In-Reply-To: <20060901150353.N73916@sprockets.gibbard.org>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
From: Joe Abley <jabley@ca.afilias.info>
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 21:38:40 -0400
To: Steve Gibbard <scg@gibbard.org>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On 1-Sep-2006, at 18:48, Steve Gibbard wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Sep 2006, Owen DeLong wrote:
>
>> I think my previous post may have touched on a more global issue.
>>
>> Given the number of such posts I have seen over time, and, my
>> experiences trying to report problems to other ISPs in the past,
>> it seems to me that a high percentage of ISPs, especially the
>> larger ones, simply don't allow for the possibility of a non-
>> customer needing to report a problem with the ability to reach one
>> of their customers.
>
> Anybody trying to put together such a BCP should first give some
> consideration to what sorts of calls from non-customers a service
> provider should be expected to accept. Based solely on Owen's
> earlier post, this looks to me like a good example of why service
> providers are sometimes reluctant to accept trouble reports from
> non-customers.
A long time ago, I was a backbone engineer at 6461. There was one
particular 6461 customer who ran online games, and whose customers
were encouraged to submit noc tickets to 6461 every time they had an
issue with network performance.
This resulted in a lot of tickets. Gamers being their naturally
twitchy selves, though, there were lots of times when we got really
early notice of problems that monitoring hadn't picked up and which
weren't reported by anybody else until much later (if at all).
So, there is *some* benefit in accepting tickets from non-customers
and churning them through the support process, even if it's not
especially cheap to do.
Joe
