[NCLUG] ISP suggestions

Frank Whiteley techzone at greeleynet.com
Sun Aug 4 00:52:33 MDT 2002


> But in that case, I would expect FRII to deal with it... either by going
to
> another provider, or forcing ICG to do what they promised to do (by
> contact, if necessary).
>
ICG and Qwest, not much choice, different set of issues.

> But, as I've intimated before, I get the feeling their dialup customers
> are a distant fifth to their commercial, co-lo, hosting, and DSL
customers.
>
> Dialup just isn't lucrative enough (for them to care) anymore... which I
> understand, but then they should get out of the business... not blame
> problems on ICG because they went with a 2nd-rate provider to save some
> money.
>
Last time I checked ICG back-hauled 15% of US ISP dial-pops, not
insignificant.  Locally, ICG is used by everyone, including several
nationals.  However, they also use Qwest, giving a little diversity.
> > There was also another issue that cropped up, that is, if a
> > user disconnected and that port was accessed again too quickly, there
> > were frequently routing problems.  ICG built some latency into releasing
> > the ports to allow the connection to reset properly.  I don't know the
> > technical specs, but when the stock market was thrashing a week ago
> > Monday, they hit 100% port utilization.  At one point, busy signals were
> > still being generated for a few seconds when ports where churning
rapidly
> > and load was only at 90%.
>
> > So although the latency is relatively short, extraordinary conditions
can
> > cause odd results.
>
> Yay IOS.
>
> > FRII says they haven't tested it yet, but does sound like a plausible
> > reason for what you're seeing, except for the V.92 implementation date.
> > Maybe before you were seeing the routing issue, now something else.
>
> Mayhaps... although, the problem seems very similar to what I was seeing
> before. I was able to actually trigger it back in December (by running a
> remote 'cvs commit' of all things), but I haven't had any need to do
> development here (yet... that will change very shortly).
>
The simple fact that all of the ICMP packets are returning would seem to
indicate its a priority issue, rather then memory.  For example, all FRII
ports are shared regionally, regardless of dial-pop.  There's no specific
number allocated to Denver, Fort Collins, or Greeley.  ICG routers are
serving multiple ISPs.  Some routers may be more heavily loaded than others,
so maybe I can't see what you're seeing, no matter how long I watch it.  I
expect it's similar across the other providers.

If your folks had the shell (photo ID required) access option added to their
FRII account, you could watch the connection back to your modem and get a
second perspective.

Frank




More information about the NCLUG mailing list