I have not heard much discussion of maintenance fees lately, however a recent set of two situations brought an idea to the front of my mind.  Should MICE have a very basic agreement with each of its members?  The reason I bring this up is that we want to keep everyone's experience with the community positive.  For example the agreement could contain a requirement to upgrade your connection if it is saturated to the point of causing packet loss (which I would assume members would want to do on their own).  

The reason I bring this up is because in the past few months I have run across carriers that I am purchasing from that had saturated peering.  The two different carriers had two completely different approaches, and the second one concerns me, and is the reason I bring up the MICE agreement.  The first was with Hurricane.  They had a saturated link to Charter in Chicago.  Within an hour of emailing in the details of what I had found to support, they had confirmed the issue, started sending me regular updates until the link upgrade was completed.  Due to the short time period that this trouble ticket lasted, I felt it went much better than I would have hoped.

The second issue was with Cogent.  They had, and possibly still have a saturated peering link with TimeWarner in Chicago.  It took me 3 emails with support across 2 business days to get them to believe the issue existed, and then once they got on the same page as me, the would not even provide me with updates on if they will even fix the issue.  I have included their final support email below.  After waiting a few days hoping they would just fix it, I was forced to manipulate BGP to avoid this saturated link.  

The bottom line is I bring this up because even though I am a paying customer of both carriers, the second situation made me feel powerless, and that I was not valued as a customer.  I realize that they probably have their legal reasons to keep me in the dark, however it has now made me an unhappy customer, and if there was a simple agreement in place about how the peering link should be maintained, then there would be a timeframe for this to be resolved within.

Jeremy

-----Original Message-----
From: Cogent Help Desk [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 7:03 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: #HD0000005266692-RE: Related Case: HD0000005265974-Packet Loss for customer TWINCITY00001

Dear Cogent Customer,

The latency and/or packet loss that you are experiencing to this destination is due to occasional high traffic with our peer TimeWarner . Our peering engineers have made them aware of the continuing issue and are pending their response. Cogent is ready to act as soon as we have cooperation from our peer and they are ready to move forward. There is no estimated time of resolve.

Please understand that Cogent does not discuss peering specific plans with our customers. Our customer support group will not be able to provide regular updates in regard to peer maintenance. If you have any questions please feel free to contact us by e-mail at [log in to unmask] or by phone at 877-7COGENT (877-726-4368).

Thank You,

Cogent Communications
T 877.726.4368, option 2
F 202.295.9061
E [log in to unmask]

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