> From: Terry Blanton > > From: Jed Rothwell > > > Perhaps this is just be my ISP making excuses about a technical glitch? > > Yes, although traffic is higher, generally outages are not the problem:
To be fair to your ISP, it should be stated that there are several tiers of service providers. The tier 1 providers are those like Sprint, IBM, MCI Worldcom, etc. The lower tiers depend on these providers and sometimes multiple levels in between. The smaller your ISP is, the more layers that might exist between him and the tier 1 provider. My earlier comments apply to tier 1 providers only. For example, my ISP, Bellsouth is a tier 2 provider who purchases from IBM, a tier 1 provider. Consequently, Bellsouth also provides services to smaller ISPs. So, your techie might say "The Internet is slow because of Katrina". However, what he really means is that the tier (x-1) provider is slow for him (tier x) which very well could be due to a failure somewhere in the tier (x-1) system due to Katrina.
