On Mon, Jul 01, 2002 at 03:15:16PM -0400, Phil Rosenthal wrote:
#1 Do you honestly believe that you wont run into any customers who will say "why should I buy from abovenet if I can peer with them? They will take a big percentage of my traffic and do it for free."
So the question for AboveNet is, did the number of customers they got from having a network with open peering offset the number of customers they lost who peered with them instead of buying transit? Personally, I think the answer is yes.
*IF* you could have a setup where you could peer AND buy at the same time, then your model works better.
An extremely bad idea from a network abuse standpoint. But then again, if someone really wanted it that badly, whats to stop them from spending $200 on a fake company that buys the transit?
#2 When something is being done for free, it is often not being done as well as if it were paid for, case in point: AboveNet's link to NY-IIX is 100mbit, right? The MRTG graphs seem to indicate that it is, AND that it was doing 90 megabit for several months straight. Shouldn't this have been upgraded to gig-e? Not cost effective?
There are a lot worse examples of congestion in their graphs, though things have gotten a lot better in the last month or so as some big customers have pulled out (supernews for example). Also remember that you are looking at the yearly graph which is a 1 day average, I'm sure the 5 minute samples were quite pegged. But as for your point of free vs paid... They had transit customers paying them and they still delivered it through congested peers, so that really doesn't prove much. I'd say this falls into the category of "why you don't want to buy from financially unstable companies who wait until there is noone left to lay off before filing chapter 11" myself. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)