AT&T WorldNet dial-up 'Net access woes continue
|
|||
 | |||
|
BASKING RIDGE, N.J. - AT&T WorldNet's dial-up Internet access customers were left twiddling their thumbs again during an eight-hour network outage last week, leaving many wondering when the ISP's string of network troubles will end.
Hundreds of thousands of AT&T WorldNet dial-up customers couldn't surf the Web or regularly send and receive e-mail Dec. 1 because of a problem that AT&T says another ISP caused by changing its routing tables.
An ISP that AT&T WorldNet interconnects with changed its routing tables to mimic those on AT&T WorldNet's network, explains Rose Klimovich, director of global IP network services at AT&T. This change caused problems on AT&T WorldNet's domain name servers, which essentially put users in a black hole when they tried to access the 'Net.
"When our users tried to get to a Web site, those requests were being sent to the wrong place," Klimovich says.
It's not easy to understand what the real network problem was, says Brownlee Thomas, a senior analyst at Giga Information Group in Cambridge, Mass. Some users could send e-mail, while others could not.
Fueling speculation on the cause of the network outage is the fact that AT&T will not say which ISP was responsible for the problem that ultimately left a very large percentage of AT&T WorldNet's 1.8 million dial-up customers without access.
Only AT&T WorldNet dial-up virtual private network customers have any chance of being compensated for losing a full business day of service. AT&T offers these customers 3% of their monthly service fee if AT&T WorldNet's dial-up network falls to an "A" or below rating from Inverse Networks, a third-party network performance measurement company, for two consecutive months.
Unless AT&T has another event that takes its national dial-up network down again for several hours, these customers are likely to get nothing but their regular bill from AT&T. AT&T WorldNet does not offer business or consumer dial-up Internet access customers any service-level guar-antees.
When AT&T WorldNet suffered a previous network outage, "AT&T issued customers a free phone card or half a month service credit," Thomas says. Since then, other service providers, such as America Online, have suffered up to 19-hour outages and offered little or no compensation.
It took AT&T WorldNet engineers more than seven hours to figure out the problem and about 20 minutes to have the other ISP fix its routing tables, according to Klimovich. Trying to pinpoint the problem took much longer than AT&T WorldNet or its customers wanted partly because the appropriate monitoring software was not in place to quickly detect such a routing error.
"What we need to do is put more robust tools in place to see something like this when it happens," Klimovich says.
Send this article to a colleague
