North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Statistical Games Providers Play (RE: availability and resiliency)

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Sun Oct 01 03:14:43 2000

On Sat, 30 September 2000, Vijay Gill wrote:
> There are a lot more variants regarding the routing architecture (IGP
> setup, bgp setup, et al), and depending on various failure modes, some are
> better than others for a subset of failures and vice versa.

True, but in the end does it end up being a zero-sum game?  Or are there
real differences in performance?  I'll pick on a couple of different providers,
but we could use anyone.

In my experience AT&T has a huge MTBF, over 7 years when I bought circuits.
But when the two natural disasters struck at the same time, it would take
AT&T several days to get the circuits working again.  On the other hand,
Sprint had a problem every month or two, but they usually had them fixed
in about 20 minutes.  What's the trade-off.  Over 10 years, the availability
numbers weren't that different between AT&T and Sprint.

Sprint hypes their SONET fiber network, AT&T hypes their FASTAR network
restoration.  Is it strictly a question of cost?  Although a lot of
advertising and sales emphasis is placed on the technology, I haven't
found the technical differences between providers affecting the delivered
performance. Non-technical factors seem to have a bigger affect.