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Re: Stop Wcom and SPRINT from merging... customer service nightmare...(Snyder article)

  • From: Vijay Gill
  • Date: Tue Jun 27 15:31:04 2000

On Tue, 27 Jun 2000, Mufti Ahmed wrote:

> The papers for my ISP connection to UUnet was signed just over 3
> Months ago and they haven't installed the circuit.  Customer Service
> !!!!!!!!TERRIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You know, I imagine a scene something like this in the halls of UUNET.

Scenario One:
<Wavy lines> pan back

Enter UUNET lackey-1, stage left.
Enter UUNET lackey-2, stage right.

Lackey-1: What ho! What ho!
Lackey-2: Alack, thou noticest that Mufti put in a circuit order three
          months ago?
Lackey-1: Indeed it is so.
Lackey-2: Since we have nothing better to do, AND since we obviously do
          not need the 3 months of revenue from Mufti, and since we are
          so evil, lets just sit on Muftis circuit for a YEAR and a day so
          as to piss Mufti off even more.
Lackey-1: So it is said, so it is done.

Exit Lackeys, stage left.

OR ALTERNATIVELY, how about this scenario two instead?

UUNET: we've got the circuit on order but due to various telco issues,
perhaps including new ring builds, we cannot get Mufti up and running.
Damn, it is costing us money in SLA and lost revenue, and it is annoying
customers and driving down our metrics for customer satisfaction.

I'm personally going with Occams Razor myself here.

> You Want to know whats really surprising ; i asked them to BGP peer
> authentication TWO WEEKS AGO and there reply was i am the first out of
> the thousands of clients that they have to ask for this. I thought
> when i asked two weeks ago the i was one of the last people to ask for
> this. Then they claim that it might be some kind of overhead. Then

No, you are one of the very few people to ask for BGP peer authentication,
ever, that I know of.  I might have missed someone and there may be tens
of thousands of other ISP's setting up BGP peer authentication on a
regular basis.  There are several people running BGP peer authentication,
but claiming it is widespread from 4-5 years ago is WRONG.

> they were claiming that they might change their routing infrastructure
> with different vendors' routers. Routers are Routers and Switches are
> Switches.

That is true. Routers are indeed routers and switches are by damn,
switches. And let the Routers route and the switches switch and where was
I again?


> I don't know about you guys but BGP authentication and BGP4 has pretty
> much been a standard for the last 4-5 years.

> I need to ask the nanog group in general; i'm not sure if this
> question is more obvious than not but do normal people out there for
> example BIG Brokerage firms have route Authentication for BGP Peering
> or is this a new thing? I'm not sure where to stand on this...

Wearing my old hat as a BIG brokerage IT person, there was no such thing
as BGP peering authentication and route authentication a couple of years
ago.  All our vital trading systems stuff went over our own private leased
lines with encryption engines in the routers.  The internet component was
used mostly for the web sites and email.

/vijay