[LINK] RFC: SLAs for Wholesale ISPs

[Roger Clarke]

I'd appreciate linker's thoughts on this one.

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A retail ISP works closely with a wholesale ISP.

The retail ISP suffers a denial of service attack.

It occurs outside 'normal business hours', say 21:30 Friday night.

The retail ISP detects the problem and notifies the wholesale ISP.

The wholesale ISP says that it's too late at night and none of their 
technicians are willing to come out and fix it.

__________________

I've anonymised the 'wholesale ISP'.

But, on my limited knowledge of the matter, it very much appears to 
me that the wholesale ISP has fallen far short of acceptable 
standards.

I'm inclined to name the company publicly.

Things that might make me change my mind include the following:

-   the wholesale ISP acknowledges that its performance was inadequate
     and agrees that the retail ISP can communicate that to its clients

-   the wholesale ISP adjusts its SLA with the retail ISP to reflect
     the level of service expected of a serious infrastructure provider

-   linkers explain to me that I'm misunderstanding something about
     how a mature, multi-level Internet industry works


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in Info Science & Eng  Australian National University
Visiting Professor in the eCommerce Program      University of Hong Kong
Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW