On Fri, 28 Sep 2001, Vadim Antonov wrote:
The reason for being very sensitive about routing tables was that ICM part of things had quite arcane routing policies; and ability of AS1800 boxes to process updates in a timely fashion was quite vital for keeping US-Europe Internet connectivity up and running.
Yeah, I know. Sometimes Sprint ICM was part of Sprint, other times it was that "other" network Sprint just happened to manage.
Marketing at that time was so clueless about Internet that they couldn't even pronounce "routing filter", and definitely couldn't make a marketing blitz out of it.
Sprint kept the filters on for years afterwards. It may have taken the clueless salespeople a few years, but they eventually did figure out how to recite the magic words "buy your circuit from sprint and you won't have problems with filters" was a way to win a sale. And who could forget the popular "Don't buy a circuit from small ISP, because they won't be able to get past the Internet filters." I went through a half-dozen Sprint sales people in different parts of the country, and by 1996 or so they all had the spiel down pat. I know, I should have taped their sales calls.