Subject: Is MBONE a supported "service"?

From: "Jon 'tex' Boone" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 1997 08:36:40 -0400

Folks,

  I read Louis' note about UUnet's mbone support with great interest. 
University of Pennsylvania is the "local" distributor of mbone for
PREPnet customers in eastern PA.  We do not provide a supported
"service" for mbone.  We consider it to be an experimental service that
is available unless it isn't.  I am wondering if anyone else is offering
mbone as a supported service and what level of support it receives.

  The impression I got from Louis is that UUnet will now treat mbone as
a service with a committment to provide the resources (machines, staff,
bandwidth) to make it work.  Is this right, Louis?

-- 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jon 'tex' Boone                              Network Operations Engineer
<[email-masked]>                                       ISC Networking
(215) 898-2477                                University of Pennsylvania

---

From: "Louis A. Mamakos" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 1997 13:28:23 -0400

> bandwidth) to make it work.  Is this right, Louis?

No, you cannot make this conclusion from the message I sent.  

Where there are certainly resources required to do the MBONE thing, the
level of reliability, availability, price etc.  can vary considerably
based on the particular service you are talking about.

Personally, I would be skeptical of using the MBONE today to deploy 
production-level services which demand high-availability, reliability,
etc. due to the lack of inter-domain multicast routing protocols.  It's
too easy to break things these days on the MBONE due to inadvertent
configuration errors, and operating as one large routing domain is just
asking for trouble.  While this is a reasonable state of affairs for
an experimental infrastructure, I don't think you can make very many
promises to customer that want to use it in a commercial capacity.

Nevertheless, there is considerable demand, based on what I hear from
people who deal with our customers, for MBONE connections.  Thus, there
is work to move from the current state of affairs of an infrastructure
managed by a small group of engineers to something more formal.

The product development work that I wrote of earlier is still in progress.
Minimally, what UUNET does and will do in the future in regards to an MBONE
service needs to be codified and written down so that our internal resources
and processes can deal with it.  That is, the NOC has a notion of what it 
is and what it's supposed to do, the install people know how to configure
it, etc.  A different dimension is what service quality promises you might
make, is there 24x7 support, and a bunch of other related issues.

Finally, I don't make product announcements for UUNET; we have marketing
people who do that.  And this likely is not the forum for such announcements.
My intent was only to clarify some remarks which had been made on this
mailing list based on factual information I am aware of.  Please do not
read anything more than that into my comments.

-- 
Louis A. Mamakos,  Manager, Strategic Technologies  [email-masked],  uunet!louie
UUNET Technologies, Inc.                            Voice: +1 703 206 5823
3060 Williams Drive                                 Fax:   +1 703 208 5390
Fairfax, VA 22031