Joshua, Customer experience is very subjective - but tends to be the basis by which companies try to attract new customers, and by which customers choose to leave their current provider. So objective, subjective or whatever, it needs to be addressed. Similar with 'Better'. You seem to be attacking the fact that these things are not nailed down to "Latency to site X is less than Y ms" or "There is under Z% packet loss to site X", when in fact thats not what the majority of customers care about anyway. I agree that 'peering' (whatever that means) isn't a silver bullet to any particular problem. I would suggest that we work harder to define the perceived problem, which I suspect is defined somewhere in the middle of: "X% packet loss and RTT of Yms to site Z" and "My Internet seems really slow today" Dean joshua sahala wrote:
On Thu, April 5, 2007 08:57, Dean Pemberton wrote:
Joe Abley wrote:
Anybody who doesn't incorporate such policy into their network presumably doesn't care how much it costs (or how long it takes) to deliver a packet, and hence it doesn't matter which way the packets go. Assuming that any of this matters, customers of such an ISP will presumably migrate elsewhere naturally, and the problem (from the perspective of the AS originating the routes) will solve itself.
What has been lacking thus far is any objective measurement of customer experience across different ISPs.
the very nature of of the phrase "customer experience" is subjective...
Customers are not keen to move ISPs, change email addresses, change bank APs etc if they are not assured of a better service.
If ISPs would adopt some neutral measurement capture, then there would be a way to say "Blah ISP is better because they <do thing X>, and Blerg ISP is worse because they don't"
define "better" - to which destinations from which sources and for what cost?
Some of the work Nevil Brownlee presented at the conference could feed into this. So could the NLANR AMP stuff (now many ISPs have this deployed again?). Even the nzdsl speed test stuff.
I don't know if there is a speedtest server on the WIX/APE, but if there were then you'd be able to get a good appreciation of how the different ISPs fared when it came to a similar service.
a millisecond or two? a kilobit or three? are you testing with an o/s which has had network setting optimized? does the average user have those same optimized settings?
would 90% of dsl users inside nz even notice the difference?
if 95%+ of the content that people want is hosted offshore, you can peer at two or twenty-nine or 300 locations within new zealand and it isn't going to change the "customer experience". in fact, it would likely decrease performance as the overhead of maintaining more and more hardware and infrastructure increases and traffic engineering is significantly complicated.
peering can be a good thing, but it isn't the panacea that it is often sold as within new zealand.
/joshua