As to Nsfnet: Seems to me that if one is gonna plunk down millions of dollars into a federally subsidized network infrastructure to replace some existing infrastructure - it should at least be upward compatible in all aspects - which includes statistical monitoring and recording. If it is impossible to do now - then someone in NSF/ANS/Merit should come out and say it. As to Ebone: I realize with ciscos it is impossible to do. But we can at least create reports of ifInOctets/ifOutOctets per Ebone backbone link, as well as ifInErrors/ifOutErrors and perhaps the downTrap to see how many times a link goes to the down state and for how long. Data Communications just had an interesting issue with an article about line reliability and it showed that on average in Europe line reliability was around 99.1% as opposed to the CCITT recommendation of 99.6% for intercontinental links and 99.9% for continental links. I have been monitoring my links and find that I average 30 down states a month sometimes for as short as 8 seconds - and Data Communications goes into this as a synchronization problem between PTTs - which use different synch methods - and they can't tell when a link goes down until you call them. Here is an extract from an article I have written for a local computer newspaper: --------------------------------------------- What are the major causes of a digital telecommunications circuit to go out of service? Synchronization and multiplexing signals on high bandwidth international links is more complicated than on slower speed analog links. Synchronizing at the international level is particularly tricky because different carriers (PTTs) often use different signalling schemes. These synchronization problems usually result in a link disruption of under 2 minutes, long enough to force users off a remote application. Due to the fact that different PTTs use different signalling standards, it is close to impossible for PTTs to monitor digital circuits and instead wait for customers to call them to report circuit outages. PTTs usually show higher availability statistics than customers, since they only start their "down clock" when a customer reports the problem, which is often 15-30 minutes after the line has gone down. Interestingly enough, the higher the data speed, the more reliable the digital data circuit (from the INTUG report): Speed Uptime ------ ------ 768kb 99.99% 384kb 99.94 1544kb (T1) 99.94 1024kb 99.9 128kb 99.88 1984kb 99.88 512kb 99.87 2048kb (E1) 99.56 64kb 99.03 256kb 97 Looking at the above table, users would be recommended to stay away from 256kb circuits and to upgrade as fast as possible from 64kb to 128kb circuits. Almost all higher speed lines (other than 64kb and 256kb) meet the CCITT recommendations. --------------------------------------------- All I am saying is that we need some 'minimal' amount of SNMP recording and reporting and I am sure we are all doing this on our own national level so why not expand it to the Ebone? Hank