Hi,
During some cell site work last night, I seem to have experienced
Comcast dropping packets from point A to point B simply based on the
fact that their IP protocol was GRE (IP protocol 47). I also found some
posts on the Internet that claim Comcast wishes to charge more money to
transport GRE packets. I'm not sure if this is true, or if I made a
mistake somehow in my traffic handling. Therefore...
Would someone be willing to create software instruments to measure this
claim in general? I'd like to see a transmitter and a receiver piece of
software that can run on Linux to generate and record a sweep of IP
packets carrying all possible protocol numbers (0-255). The protocol
payloads themselves don't need to be well-formatted, just the protocol
number in the IP header needs to be set. Your software will be
considered successful if it measures 100% of all protocols as available
over an unfiltered (eg: LAN) link.
The results of such a measurement would be useful in gauging the ISP
quality of any given carrier. It seems we're moving closer to Selective
Protocol Service Providers (SPSP) and away from true Internet Service
Providers (ISP) if this GRE finding turns out to be right.
--Bart