You're Not Dealing with AT&T!

You're Not Dealing with AT&T!
We poor guinea pigs have been dealing with packetloss for almost a year now, and long ago it has become clear that Virgin is not the bad guy in this particular soap opera. JeffP has explained again and again how vie is paying big bucks to put their servers as close to the NAPs as possible, with east and west divisions to boot - as well as a new Chicago server coming soon. Rather, the problem of excessive ploss and monstrous pings seems to be the fault of a few large corporations who are simply not doing their job. As you all know, your packets are usually sent up and down the backbone of a number of companies in the process of going from one place to another, and it only takes a single choke-point along this route to screw everything up.

From numerous postings of Sub-O-Tronic and traceroute results on the Tech Support board, the two major offenders in this charade appear to be mae-east, run by hlc.com and MCI. (www.hlc.com is inaccessible from 3 PPP accounts even as I write... go figure). In this essay, I will choose to talk about MCI since the mae-east horse has already been beaten way beyond the point of death.

MCI has the world's largest internet backbone, and on their web page they make all sorts of grandiose claims about its speed. Well, as I just mentioned this means crap, since it only takes a single bum router to screw up all the packets going from one place to another. Unfortunately, if you want to play SubSpace and your packets have to hop through MCI's network to reach vie, you are screwed. MCI 'customers' have posted their results, and I have confirmed these results with one of my PPP accounts, which uses MCI. The verdict? 25% downstream - server to you - packetloss, which means the game is all but unplayable. And this is not only to vie. I get generally revolting performance to the entire Internet from this account, due to MCI.

Read this message for some representative numbers from Chakotay.

So what can we do? Virgin has no influence over MCI as they aren't an MCI customer. However, if you are stuck with an ISP that is, you can try to talk to MCI yourself or bug your ISP into talking to them. However, Chakotoy did attempt to talk to MCI and they blew him off. Here is what he has to say about it: 

..another thing: MCI is as stubborn as hell. I talked to HLC a while ago, and I really mean TALKED. they RESPONDED. they said they were working on the problem, they saw that MCI was a major misfit, and they were even considering changing their routers in such way that they don't pass the packets over to MCI. I sent many e-mails to MCI (polite ones, of course), and got NOTHING back. NOTHING. not even an acknowledgement that they got the messages...

Perhaps if we turned up the heat on our good friends over at la-la land stuff will begin to happen. I have searched the MCI web site and couldn't find a relevant email address or phone number, though. If someone does find such an address and could tell me, I will post it here for the world to see. It might also help if we MCI phone customers threatened to switch our long-distance carriers back to AT&T en masse - or better yet, Sprint.

[4/1/97]