[1418] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Volume-sensitive charging
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Sun Sep 29 18:52:20 1991
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 91 18:51:52 -0400
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: SEAN@SDG.DRA.COM
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Sean Donelan's message of Sun, 29 Sep 1991 16:55:29 CDT <910929165529.6ae3@SDG.DRA.COM>
My practical experience has been that other network vendors welcome
reports of outages from anyone, "competitor"'s customers included. For
all the obvious reasons (the sooner someone gets on it, the better,
who cares where the info came from.)
The one piece of technology that makes this all much more palatable
than it otherwise might be is electronic mail. That e-mail message to
a NIC or NOC point-of-contact is so non-threatening yet useful
(details written down, who to get back to etc) that it makes what
otherwise might be as you describe a positive thing. I'll report
whatever I see to whoever I think is the right person and occasionally
get "try this, try that, ok, looks fine now" phone calls to verify a
fix from all sorts of miscreants :-)
The only possible exception is where it's not very clear who's fault
it is right away and who should be the vendor scrambling to fix it.
The worst problems are ones where although someone has screwed up (or
is in a jam for some reason, say a dead piece of hardware or telco
outage) and the other vendor could perhaps patch around the problem
with some effort, often something that will need to be undone when the
immediate crisis is over and possibly having some other side-effects.
That's understandably frustrating.
But hey, that's life in the fast lane.
-Barry Shein
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