Internet, the slime magnet

by Philip Greenspun for the Web Tools Review

Note that this document has to some extent been superseded by the servers chapter from my Web book.

"Did you hear about the IBM salesman's wife who was still a virgin after 20 years? That's right. Every night, he sat on the edge of the bed and told her how great it was going to be."

-- Bud Keyes, Babcock & Wilcox executive, upon hearing my promise to add the features he requested to my computer-aided mechanical engineering system.

Rats

Hot markets pull rats out of the woodwork. Internet is the hottest thing going right now. Most of the would-be users are naive and aren't aware that there are companies, e.g., BBN, with over 20 years of experience in doing things right. That means that the playing field is more or less level for all suppliers, regardless of competence or experience.

You should assume that your Internet service provider (ISP) will do the following:

not have a competent TCP/IP network administrator (such persons are scarce and too expensive for the no-capitalization companies that enter the ISP business). Instead, a kid fresh out of college will be leafing through the Cisco router manual while your connection is down.
sell 50 companies T1 service and then funnel them all into, say, theMCI backbone through one T1 line. This means $100,000 in revenue and only $2,000 in expenses, i.e., the fast buck that these shady ISPs want, but it means 64Kbit service for you if you are lucky.
provide name service for your domain off two machines in the same subnet (violates InterNIC policy but saves them a few pennies a year so they do it). If the single T1 line to your ISP is down and someone asks for www.yourcompany.com, the error message will say "yourcompany.com doesn't exist" rather than "yourcompany.com is unreachable right now".

Lies

The primary skill of the second-tier ISP is snowing management in Corporate America. The big lies that they preach are

You won't need your own network administrator if you work with us.
We'll take care of you.
We'll log and monitor your access.
You can have a Unix box and a firewall and we'll administer it expertly and diligently for you.

Vendors such as ANS won't come to your company and kiss your boss's ass. They won't tell you how the future is so bright you'll need to wear sunglasses. They give you a wire and promise that if you can talk to it, you can talk to the Internet, 99+% of the time. They don't promise to solve all of your problems.

It might be nice if someone could in fact do more than the reputable guys promise to do, but in fact almost nobody can.

Vendors who won't fuck you

(or at least not very hard)

People who are good because they come from ARPAnet

While your local ISP startup founder was running a three card monte game in his kindergarten, BBN was working with MIT to build the ARPAnet. Because ARPAnet connected computers running operating systems predating Unix, its services were more reliable than Internet (even though hardware at the time was incredibly flaky). MIT won't sell you a network connection, but BBN will and even if they have to hire a bunch of mediocre people as they expand, at least their standards were set in a day when everything was expected to work. [OK, maybe not; several BBN customers wrote me recently to say how badly they've been screwed by BBN. BBN also demonstrated their deep understanding of the Web by gratuitously reshuffling their filenames so that my links into their site returned "file not found" errors.]
ANS used to operate the NSF Backbone for the Feds, who had personal experience with ARPAnet and transmitted those expectations and culture to the ANS people.
People who are good because they come from telephony
Yes, the phone company sucks, but at least they think that 99.9% uptime isn't quite good enough. This heritage makes MCI and Sprint safe suppliers.
People who might be OK despite the fact that they come from Unix
Nothing touched by Unix was ever very reliable and USENET was no exception. If mail and news got there "most of the time," that met the expectations of the systems builders. Heir to this sorry tradition is AlterNet, somewhat cheaper and allegedly not always so much worse than the "real" suppliers.

If you are considering using any other ISP, insist on talking to at least five customers in your area. If any of them have had more than 10 minutes of unscheduled downtime in the preceding three months, forget the ISP. Do a traceroute from a remote location on the Internet. With a sleazy provider, you'll note that it takes just a few milliseconds to get from, say, Stanford to the New York point-of-presence for the primary carrier, e.g., MCI. Packets that have to go through that final T1 to the ISP will take another 50, 100, or even 400 milliseconds. If you can't understand this paragraph or don't know how to run traceroute, then you are in no position to evaluate an ISP.

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philg@mit.edu

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