[NCLUG] ISP suggestions

[J. Paul Reed]

On Sat, 3 Aug 2002, Frank Whiteley wrote:

> Yeah, the file is pretty strange.

> Never seen it before either.

Yeah... and trying to explain it to a FRII tech (not bashing FRII
specifically, here...) was even harder...

> Doesn't look like re-training.  V.90 is much more susceptible than V.34
> or lower, plus you'd likely lose packets.

I'm betting it's a bug in IOS... they said they were using Cisco equipment
(which I actually knew before I talked to them).

The quality of IOS *is* going up, but if you talk to anyone who's had to
deal with it on a daily basis, IOS really is a steaming pile of crap.

> Very few ISPs maintain their own ports any longer.  As I understand it,
> FRII was to have had the same granularity as before, but ICG didn't come
> through.

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).

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.

> 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).

> BTW, is there call-waiting on either number?  If so, you are initializing
> calls with *70, ?

Nope... Mom can't stand call-waiting. ;-)

Later,
Paul
  -----------------------------------------------------------------------
  J. Paul Reed                 preed at sigkill.com || web.sigkill.com/preed
  Wait, stop!  We can outsmart those dolphins.  Don't forget: we invented
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