At 06:57 AM 5/16/96 +1000, Geoff Huston wrote:

Paul,

You can be a vocal as you desire, but ultimately from this part of the globe the dominant factor in any ISP business is the cost of the International Private Lease. This lease cost is approximately 10 times the cost of domestic infrastructure.

Now when you construct an IPL in a competitive environment where do you terminate it? Generally you are loking for an optimal mix of price and functionality. The observation for the AP region today is that the cheapest IPL half circuits for the AP region terminate in the US. Hence Randy's observation. The internal infrastructure within the AP region happens in a second pass, once the primary objective of major connectivity is achieved internal infrastructure can be cost effective if there is internal traffic flow to match.

About the only thing that could hasten regional infrastructure is a drastic revision of the trading practices and expectation of return on investment by the undersea cable investors. Exchange points have little impact per se as they are, in economic terms, a minor aspect of the entire equation.

Yes, they are still a minor aspect but I think they contribute serveral more percents to the return on investment. In AP, we have exchange points such as NSPIXP of Japan and HKIX of Hong Kong. If ISPs in other AP countries have links to JP or HK and automatically (or semi-automatically) they can connect to all ISPs in that country/region instead of just one or several ISPs in it, the connection is more valuable and justifiable. If the links can also be used to connect to other ISPs in other AP countries via that exchange, the connection is even more valuable and justifiable. Of course, we still can't eliminate the links to US altogether. But we probably can slow down the growth of bandwidth requirements to US a little bit. (NOTE: HKIX has mandatory MLPA for routes within Hong Kong.) Che-Hoo Cheng | Email: chcheng@cuhk.edu.hk Data Comms and Networking Section | URL: http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ Information Technology Service Unit | Tel: +852 2609-8848 The Chinese University of Hong Kong | Fax: +852 2603-5001