phil@amdcad.UUCP (Phil Ngai) (01/28/85)
We have DDS lines to San Antonio and Austin, Texas, and find that the lines go down for several seconds several times a day. On a good day. On bad days, they go down for minutes at a time. The equipment we use, bisync and Tellabs (modified X.25), can't handle these outages and people get their sessions dropped, our big file transfers (done with wonderful RSCS) have to start over, etc. It's not a great situation. Is our experience shared by others? Would TCP/IP (the protocol designed to survive a nuclear blast) be more reliable? I heard Texas was once the only state which didn't regulate its phone company, I wonder if that would have anything to do with it. And if this shows the direction the soon to be completely unregulated ATT Long Lines (or whatever it's now called) will go? -- This is my opinion, I guess. Phil Ngai (408) 749-5720 UUCP: {ucbvax,decwrl,ihnp4,allegra}!amdcad!phil ARPA: amdcad!phil@decwrl.ARPA
jbn@wdl1.UUCP (01/28/85)
1. Yes, TCP/IP will survive line outages. All implementations should allow at least a minute or two of outage before deciding the line is down hard. 2. If your DDS line is giving problems, find the DDS control point and talk to them. (This can be a non-trivial problem; it once took me three hours on the phone to find out that our Dearborn MI to Palo Alto, CA link was controlled from Cleveland, OH. And this was before deregulation.) 3. If you have lots of DDS lines, get your own control point.