Support for the US link

[Tony Barry]

This is no way is meant to be critical of Geoff & co who are giving support
at the coal face.

On aarnet-contacts there has been considerable discussion on the high
packet loss on the US link and thence slowness of connectivity out of
Australia.  There has also been comments on a number of library related
lists about some US based library services  - for which we pay money -
being unusable because of the poor connection.  There have even been
suggestions to switch to AUSTPAC for those services which can be reached in
that way, a clearly retrograde step.

Some months ago at Questnet it was announced that an upgrade to the link
was imminent.  This morning an extra 4 meg link was to be added and for a
time things were quite a bit better - I emailed a few people to get some
comparative comment.  Now either it has failed or the link has again
saturated.

I understand the agreement between AVCC and Telstra was based upon
performance guarantees measured by looking at the time taken for packets to
travel across the link rather than packet loss which is a far more
realistic measure.

All this preamble is so that I can raise the question whether Telstra is
supporting the overseas link adequately.  It would seem that a good case
could be made to say they are not, as they allow the link to saturate, are
slow to add additional capacity and are only adding capacity when the link
becomes unusable rather than forecasting increased demand and planning for
it.  A conspiracy theorist could no doubt suggest reasons why this might
happen.  There is a well known  alternative to conspiracies as  an
explanation which could well apply in this case .

Tony

__________________________________________________________________________
Tony Barry                  URL:http://snazzy.anu.edu.au/People/TonyB.html
Centre for Networked Information and Publishing & also
Centre for Networked Access to Scholarly Information  fone  +61 6 249 4632
Australian National University Library                phax  +61 6 279 8120
Canberra  A.C.T. 0200, AUSTRALIA                      tony@info.anu.edu.au