OT: more on internet phones

[Fairlight]

Not a lot more, but something pertinent:

Lest one think that router failures are rare and really wouldn't affect one
for long, that's not the only thing that can bite you.  I believe they call
the other ones "companies" and "lawyers".

I remember a period of several days a few months back when Level 3 and
Cogent got into a tiff about rates and billing between them and Level 3
decided they weren't going to pass -any- more Cogent traffic until the
situation was resolved.  You couldn't even get mail to some Cogent sites,
much less VOIP traffic.  Nothing whatsoever.

That was a three day blackout for traffic:

http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/outsourcing/isptelecom/story/0,10801,105790,00.html

But risk of that sort of situation alone is worse than the technical risks
involved in putting all your eggs in one tech basket.  There is (happily, in
most cases) a lot less regulation of the net than there is over phones.
This helps the net be a better place, but it also leads to a lack of
certain guarantees of service unless you have strong contracts.  Even if
you have strong contracts, it may not help.  I'm not sure any Cogent
customers would have recourse for the Level 3 dispute, for instance, and it
wouldn't help in the interim anyway.  This fell outside the boundary of the
enduser contract as far as service interruption, as it wasn't under their
control--even if they -wanted- to give you service, they couldn't have.
Contracts don't always protect you from things higher up the chain.  

Lack of regulation is how people got burned dropping their T1 lines like
they were raining out of the sky to switch to cheap DSL lines that were
rated at the same speed for a tiny fraction of the cost.  There's no FCC
guaranteed service restoration time on DSL like there is on a T1 circuit.
Unless you have a strong and clear contract that says otherwise, they can
leave you waiting almost as long as they want to.  They most likely won't,
but they -can-.  It's not regulated the same way.  There're business-class
DSL services available, but I can assure you that DSL is -not- a T1 in
terms of stability (try it when there's harsh lightning storms sometime),
and that the business class of service basically stipulates how fast
they're bound to fix it if it breaks, or what level of service they'll
-try- to guarantee.  Sometimes those guarantees will actually boil down
to, "We can't make it go even 1mbit, even though you're paying for 1.5mbit
service.  We've tried everything, this is how fast it goes.  If you don't
like it, you can terminate your service."  Sure, you can--meanwhile you
incur startup fees with whomever you go [back] to as a replacement.

At any rate, the business side of things would worry me as much as the tech
side--if not more.  Got to thinking about how the Level 3 and Cogent
dispute would have affected someone in this situation and thought I'd bring
it up for consideration.

As Richard said, buyer beware.  I'd consider it a risky move, and I'm -not-
tech-shy.  Hardly.  :) 

mark->