I believe that the central issue remains the lack
of an accepted, and maybe codified in the form of
binding text, agreement between a service provider
and a customer.
The current debate about what percentage packet loss
is acceptable is meaningless without including some notion of
what the *cost* of that packet loss is to the person or
application suffering that loss.
We need to address a central simple question, viz.
"What is the service provider selling ?"
or,
"What is the customer buying ?"
[hopefully the answers match :)-]
The phone company does not make any promise of
global reachability. They would be stupid to do so,
as everyone knows that PacBell has no control over
Bell Atlantic or France Telecom, for example.
What they *do* do is assure, and, more importantly, reassure
us when we try to reach France and cannot, that they are
tracking the problem. This facet is, for the most part,
missing in today's Internet.
Perhaps the BMWG can work on a template for an agreement
between a customer and a provider that ..
Customers can then choose amongst competing service providers
on more than a price basis.
Service providers can then compete on the basis of fulfilling
these customer expectations.
Another aspect is fate-sharing. No, not in the EID sense ;)- AT&T is quite dependant on MCI having their act together on the technical end of things to sustain its own voice business. Yes, they compete ferociously on Madison Ave., but they do co-operate in the trenches. They have to. They have a common fate. [It remains to be seen how this will work when baby bells are allowed to compete for IXC business.] How important is it for Sprintlink that InternetMCI remain stable ? I know that some of the more established NSPs talk frequently, and use this list also. What about the newer guys ? Do they have a sense of fate sharing ? Any johnny-come-lately with a Linux box, gated and a few thousand dollars can become a service provider. While I like the fact that the monetary barrier-to-entry is low, I don't like that they don't all recognize the fate-sharing inherent in the Internet service business.
Unless we address some of these tough issues, the Internet may not take that next step into becoming a serious infrastructural resource comparable to the highway system, the phone system or even the U.S Mail system (where a lost "packet" can have a quantifiable cost, and disgruntled "routers" have been known to shoot their frustrations away :)- )