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