Not everyone subscribed to NZNOG runs an ISP - some of us are consumers of Internet services and many of us advise our customers who are consumers of Internet services.

</lurk> I'm a consumer of broadband. I get DSL from a major non-Telco ISP. It's reliable enough, but it occasionally has six hour outages occasionally from midnight to 6am. No idea why, but when I pay $80/month and use over 20GB of traffic I don't care because I pay residential rates and don't have a SLA. If I was running a business that relies on connectivity I'd get a business connection and a decent SLA with compensation agreements, and I'd pay through the nose for it. Just for another fairly redundant analogy, You wouldn't expect to be able to convert your property to an Olympic-sized swimming pool and still get your water from the council's pipes at no extra cost would you? It's always true that you pay for what you get, and businesses are in the game for money, not to give customers warm fuzzies. -- Phillip Hutchings http://www.sitharus.com/

On 20-Dec-2006, at 17:41, John @ netTRUST wrote:

Customers do not expect the world for free and if you want to compare it to Frame Relay (A serice that ISP's like yourself sell as 'carrier grade') - that is just another overpriced, unreliable piece of you know what - but one which comes with a *marketing* edge - It's expensive, comes with a pokey SLA and the 'feel good' aspect that if Telecom / Telstra is screwing you at every bill - it must be the bee's knee's.

With respect to network diversity, the comparison you want to make is the cost of conditioning and connecting an *existing piece of copper infrastructure, paid for long ago by the taxpayer* to the cost of that plus *a second, diverse, independent access to your building such that you have protected access to the core*. Frame Relay is typically delivered over an unprotected local loop, just like DSL (although in some cases that unprotected loop may be in- building from a SONET node, which if you're lucky will have a protected path to the core). (If you're extra lucky, that protected path will actually run over different strands of fibre, and follow different fibre routes, and won't be two wavelengths provisioned on the same pair of glass.) The difference between frame-relay and DSL tends to be the contracted commitment by the supplier to fixing it when it breaks, a fact which you alluded to, snarkily, above. The cheapest way to get diverse access to something is to find two different providers who hate each other sufficiently that they won't allow common use of fibre routes or conduit, and whose aggregation and switching nodes are in different parts of town, and use both to access whatever it is you're trying to reach (a datacentre, the Internet, the PSTN, whatever). If you're a business in an established, multi-tenant building, it's perfectly possible that you can buy such things for relatively sane amounts of money, without anybody having to do a new build. Diversity in suppliers is in many cases better than diverse access to a single provider, since you are dealing with different sets of engineers who hopefully aren't all getting drunk together in the same room in Palmerston North, reconfiguring their routers from their laptops and smart phones at the same time for fun. If you're a residential user in some parts of the country you have multi-supplier options (e.g. a TCL cable modem and a Telecom DSL service, or Telecom DSL and Woosh, or frame-relay and Citylink metro ethernet, or ISDN and 3G). Multi-homing using devices which are naturally infected with such horrors as NAT and dynamic addresses is not fun, but it can be done for those who are prepared to put in (or pay for) the hours of fiddling involved. But getting a single supplier to build diverse access to your office/ house/whatever is unlikely to be tremendously cheap, unless you're a big customer or located in a particularly strategic location in a larger market. This is not a new development, or a NZ-specific development. There's a reason that the oft-quoted five-nines reliability of the PSTN is only ever quoted in respect to the core, and not the last mile. Joe

On Thu, 2006-12-21 at 14:00 +1300, John @ netTRUST wrote:

...

Frame Relay is typically delivered over an unprotected local loop, just like DSL (although in some cases that unprotected loop may be in- building from a SONET node, which if you're lucky will have a protected path to the core). (If you're extra lucky, that protected path will actually run over different strands of fibre, and follow different fibre routes, and won't be two wavelengths provisioned on the same pair of glass.) The difference between frame-relay and DSL tends to be the contracted commitment by the supplier to fixing it when it breaks, a fact which you alluded to, snarkily, above.

1. Frame relay is IMHO a glorified version of ADSL - in actual fact it's commonly provisioned from the same place, using the same methodology / equipment and usually results in a not-much-different reliability. (Antedotal)

2. My own personal experience of Frame Relay SLA, and more antedotal evidence, is that in practice it isn't worth the hefty premium paid for Frame Relay.

There is a considerable number of small and upcoming tech / internet businesses operated from home in areas where fibre is not an option even if the person would be willing to pay for ethernet over fibre (ATM, lets not go there).

hmmm.. John @ netTRUST goes to http://nettrust.co.nz ..... Hey! You seem familiar! http://www.companies.govt.nz Company ID: 1282384 http://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/nznog/2004-October/009102.html ho ho ho. Merry Xmas. jamie

On Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:24:55 +1300, Jonny Martin wrote:

On 21/12/2006, at 2:20 PM, jamie baddeley wrote:

...

John @ netTRUST

goes to http://nettrust.co.nz

Perhaps you mean http://nettrust.net.nz :)

Perhaps you mean http://www.(satelite|electronic|networkstuff).co.nz/ :) - Drew

On Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:59:20 +1300, "John @ netTRUST" wrote:

In future this sort of miniscule stuff is probably best handled in private rather then sent to the whole list.

Spoken like someone who should of taken that advice in the past. - Drew

If you're irritated at Dean because you think he's speaking for TCL, and you're interpreting his realspeak as telco arrogance, then that's easily fixed: he doesn't work for TCL any more, so I think it's safe to say he's not speaking for them in this thread.

I thought he just didn't like me. Can't say I was worried =) I never spoke for TCL. I was gagged when I worked there, and now that I don't, well that speaks for itself. Dean

Not everyone subscribed to NZNOG runs an ISP - some of us are consumers of Internet services and many of us advise our customers who are consumers of Internet services.

I sincerely hope, John, that your advise to customers who require Internet Access for business continuity, includes an if-all-else-fails backup plan. In my case, when Internet Access was a requirement, I for a long time maintained Dialup Internet Access with an alternative ISP over and above my DSL line. For the $2ish/month this may typically cost, its excellent insurance - phones tend to be more resiliant than DSL. I retain dialup access even now as a plan-b, but its no longer with an alternate supplier (If I get desperate, I drive to one of our office locations...) These days a higher speed alternative comms option may be a 3G card. Or Woosh, if available. If you have the option of Cable _And_ DSL, then this too might be a smart move.... it comes back to how much you're willing to pay for that insurance, right? Where you run services on the back end of a residential grade link - like say a Mail Server accepting mail via SMTP - that complicates the DR plan. You'd need an advertised Secondary MX and your secondary connection to have a Fixed IP. Not that hard, actually. If you're on entry level commercial-grade - Frame Relay as an example - you can be configured for ISDN Dialup on-demand backup, which can handle routed IP networks. Routers can bring the ISDN up as required, and routing protocols will handle this as a matter of course. Businesses that have come to depend on their consumer-grade internet access services should be prepared to survive for a matter of hours or days based on 'alternate comms'. This may include using your fall-back Internet to disable your online purchase or enquiry forms ('Contact us by phone or fax - sorry for the inconvenience'). It may simply mean you use your Business Internet Banking client over a dialup for a couple of days, and that whilst you're online your fax line is busy, so you don't dawdle. This seems pretty straight forward BCP to me - as most Internet Outages are generally resolved within no longer than say, 24-48 hours. More significant outages (out into the weeks) of any sort, well, I agree they're largely unacceptable. They're also (generally) a hellovalot less common - were they frequent, I imagine we'd see lots of service-provider hopping... (oh, wait, thats not always an option, is it...) (Sorry to dredge up a couple-of-hours-old tangent on this, but i'm posting to the list in the hope that other posters who may perhaps not be in the NZNOG target audience might see some value in it.) My personal thoughts. Regards Mark.