Postcards from the Bleeding Edge
Monday, December 06, 2004
AT&T - Marketing good connectivity, ignoring bad connectivity
Network statistics are a wonderful thing. They allow sysadmins and experienced users to pinpoint where a specific problem is on the vast complex global network that is the internet.But, if you're in marketing, bad numbers are, well... bad. Double plus ungood. If you have bad connectivity to a certain location, just sweep them under the rug. Pretend the connectivity isn't even there...
AT&T boasts of their connectivity numbers... but doesn't bother publishing that their transport to China has sucked for, like, forever.
[root@blackbird arm]# traceroute 221.0.183.9
traceroute to 221.0.183.9 (221.0.183.9), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 * * *
2 12.244.101.65 (12.244.101.65) 24.980 ms 59.194 ms 12.364 ms
3 12.244.67.193 (12.244.67.193) 77.092 ms 10.749 ms 12.548 ms
4 12.244.72.206 (12.244.72.206) 30.115 ms 14.706 ms 14.096 ms
5 gbr1-p70.sffca.ip.att.net (12.123.13.58) 14.330 ms 15.906 ms 17.105 ms
6 tbr2-p012401.sffca.ip.att.net (12.122.11.81) 17.651 ms 18.047 ms 19.769
s
7 tbr1-cl3.la2ca.ip.att.net (12.122.10.26) 24.400 ms 30.638 ms 93.318 ms
8 gar2-p300.lsrca.ip.att.net (12.123.199.105) 63.357 ms 28.395 ms 30.097 m
9 12.118.130.38 (12.118.130.38) 1549.606 ms 1553.739 ms 1545.321 ms
10 219.158.3.25 (219.158.3.25) 1734.586 ms 1442.176 ms 1777.826 ms
11 * 219.158.6.246 (219.158.6.246) 1736.574 ms 1403.876 ms
12 218.57.243.118 (218.57.243.118) 1769.467 ms 1763.154 ms *
13 218.57.243.114 (218.57.243.114) 1499.597 ms 1769.000 ms 1758.781 ms
14 218.58.69.81 (218.58.69.81) 1458.181 ms 1775.123 ms 1749.077 ms
15 221.0.250.114 (221.0.250.114) 1375.403 ms 1698.070 ms 1753.446 ms
16 10.255.88.26 (10.255.88.26) 1406.928 ms 1687.450 ms 1526.266 ms
--- 221.0.250.114 ping statistics ---
50 packets transmitted, 45 received, 10% packet loss, time 49016ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1280.639/1338.617/1434.109/35.290 ms, pipe 3
Anybody out there know why China is dropping 10% of my packets and taking 1.6 seconds to do a round trip??? Huh? Censorship? (... of PING packets??? ) Bad design? Handwaving that it's China's problem, not AT&Ts?
I can hardly imagine what the Net is like on that side of the world, it looks to me that they are living in the days of uucp.
I just spent a fruitless 20 minutes looking for whoever I gripe to at ATT to kvetch... no luck... I haven't the faintest idea how to shake down China's internet leaders - so I'm bitching in public. I can get to India in 220 ms, Russia in 240 ms... Wassamatter China, can't keep up???
¶ 11:23 PM 0 comments
