From: "Sean M. Doran" <smd@clock.org> Subject: Re: different thinking on exchanging traffic Date: Fri, 22 May 1998 17:38:12 -0700 [...] Meanwhile, you might find the Sprint response to the NSFNET NAP solicitation ("National Virtual NAP") hanging around somewhere online. You should read it and imagine why it didn't fly.
I believe that all four of the winning NSFNET NAP submissions proposed nationwide "NAPs". I believe that the reason they didn't happen is that the NSF asked for and assumed it would get four geographically-focused solutions. I suspect that the notion of awarding four NAPs, all of which covered all of the country, provided the NSF a certain amount of heartburn. I believe that the nationwide NAP concept died, (or was killed), at the time for administrative, not technical, reasons. But, this is all speculation on my part... I have two conflicting notions about the the interesting possibilities offered by nationwide layer-two services: o Layer-two services with distance-insensitive pricing, such as ATM, create some interesting opportunities. If it doesn't cost any more to get across the country than to get across town, why should I build a local NAP rather than a nationwide NAP? (Unless, of course, I am a RBOC and am administratively constrained from offering inter-LATA service.) (I am also ignoring a comparison of a NAP-in-a-closet/POP/parking ramp versus a NAP-in-a-metropolitan-area; this is e-mail to nanog, not a paper for Sigcomm.) Perhaps more relevant today, why should I build a regional Gigapop, _if_ my ATM pricing is truly distance-insensitive? (There might be an answer to the last question, I really don't know. But, I keep asking.) In other words, if pricing is distance-insensitive, why do I need local exchanges? o Distance matters. It is easy to configure an IP network over a large layer-two service that bounces packets around the country, (because IP routing protocols generally think in terms of hop count, not [physical] distance). It would be nice if routing protocols thought about [physical] distance, rather than require the network designer to be responsible for designing the network such that considerations of physical distance were implicit in the network design. Of course, in the good old days before distance-insensitive-priced services, this wasn't such an issue. (I don't know whether there are very many copies of Sprint's "National Virtual NAP" proposals hanging around. I had to nearly sign my life away to get a copy at the time...) -tjs