Roeland M.J. Meyer <rmeyer@mhsc.com> wrote on Dec 5:
For large capacity sites, colo is the only way, with potential self-homing within two years. It just can't happen faster than that. Also, smaller providers are out, because of public peering point congestion and that is usually their only avenue.
As someone else pointed out, us smaller providers often have multiple connections to tier-1's. In the past, it was likely that your friendly local ISP had only two tier-1 pipes and your regional had a big pipe into one of the NAPs. But given the overwhelming market consolidation of the tier-1's these days, independent regionals are more likely to have done what we've done: just go out and pay UUNET, GTE, et al whatever their toll is so we can guarantee high availability. Even at those high prices, we can still provide better service than any one of those companies can on its own within our market (i.e. it's no big deal to UUNET if their Boston PoP goes down for a few minutes, but it would be if _our_ Boston PoP went down). What I'm also finding these days is that, with the exception of UUNET, wholesale pricing is favorable to us. This business model has, in fact, recently sold well on Wall Street. A company called InterNAP just went public, and that's what they're doing.
Large providers, with their own private dark-fiber network, leaving only last-mile traffic to the public Internet, appears to be the only way to go <sigh>.
I sure hope not...it takes even longer for them to bring up a new long-haul link than it does for us to upgrade or bring in a new local circuit to one of the major tier-1's. -rich