Gordon Cook wrote:
now you may say that from a competitive point of view this makes no difference. perhaps. But what if the big four no longer see the need to upgrade their bandwidth INTO and OUT OF exchange points? what happens to the "secondary ten" when they get some large customers who see their packects die between Sprints mae east router and the nearest sprint backbone POP if that pipe is over crowded. Will we hear them complain about ungodly packet loss and move to the industrial strength service of the big four who can do hot potato hand offs to each other at multiple private exchanges around the US and increasingly around the world? if such is the case, how will the secondary ten ever get enough customers to convince the top four to let them do private exchanges as well?
Is this part of an inevitable dynamic that is and will channel market share into the hands of the top four?
Gordon - You're describing the dilemma of any newcomers to the net: Assuming that the new net can get peering agreements at the public ix's (this in itself is not easily assumed) there is still an uphill battle. . If you don't have private interconnects, your traffic goes over the 90% avg. utilized links between the IX point and the large provider's backbone. This makes it difficult to get and keep customers - after all, 75% of the internet is lossy/slow to them, and if they switch to any of the larger providers they don't see that loss. . You can't get a private interconnect with another provider unless you have the traffic (customers) to justify it. See previous point as to why you can't get the customers. Interesting points. Rod