Re: New Document available: RIPE-271 (fwd)

[Fotis Georgatos <]

Dear All,

I'd like to offer my view on what end-users' needs might look like,
wearing the hat of an x-sysadmin of the Test Traffic Measurements project.

On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 11:25:27AM +0200, Roberto Percacci wrote:
> In particular, I expect that ISP's will generally not be happy to see 
> their performance data made public by third parties, even when the third 
> party is trusted to be neutral and objective.

First thing is to answer who might be involved as a member in the project,
and at the current moment this is mostly ISPs who operate in the RIPE region.
This set includes commercial, academic and other non-profit organizations.

Since the commercial sector is the major carrier of Internet technologies,
nowadays, their interests are also "Internet community's interests".
Their demand for discretion should not pass unnoticed.

> Also, I think that total disclosure of the data is neither necessary nor 
> useful.
[...] 
> It seems to me that publishing a mountain of raw data would not
> really be of much use to the general RIPE community.

Considering those who don't mind having their metrics published and those who do,
we have two different groups. RIPE NCC might provide solutions for both,
either by maintaining two different service levels with an adequate pricing
model 'because privacy has a cost', or, allow the members to self-organize
their own TTM projects by using the source code on self-managed custom setups
and RIPE NCC picking either side as default for the standard service.

Making a shoe of a single size, might be hard to live with...

> My main suggestion is that RIPE publish on the web site only some 
> statistical summaries of the TTM data. This would be of general usefulness 
> insofar as it would give everybody a general feeling of what to expect 
> from their Internet connection.

Any form of public "summary" or "review" that can draw conclusions among ISPs for
service quality, will be considered potentially harmful for commercial providers.
A few providers compete on quality and others on price. Both are useful.

> Another way in which this could benefit the community at large is to give 
> also non - TTM participants a way of gathering their own performance 
> statistics, at the same time gathering much higher statistics.
> This could work as follows: a user downloads a software that pings the TTM 
> hosts for some time and then extracts quality statistics.
> In addition, these data would also be sent to the central database and 
> used in forming the "grand average".

Currently, there is no better way to do this other than downloading... TTM itself.
TTM follows very specific standards for measurements, that only a handful of
other similarly-built tools can be used for data proof and correlation.

I'd like to offer my advice of non accepting such a "grandaverage", since it puts
in the loop of measurements parties who may be considered "mutually untrusted",
in the commercial spirit of the word. Confidentiality issues will raise eyebrows.

cheers,

Fotis