Sanjay Dani <sanjay@professionals.com> writes:
There are backbone providers and there are providers of specialized ISP or hosting or security etc. services that need independent* IP address space and do not have to waste resources on building a private "backbone".
NAT. Sean. (read an old message by Paul Vixie prior to some NANOG that wasn't worth going to really where I think he might have said pretty much the same things he wrote) P.S.:
I had thought predicting consolidation in the Internet services market was an exclusive realm of only the clueless "market research" firms. Even they seem to be wisening up.
"Internet services" is a rather broad term. I think the "consolidation is coming" crowd is looking more at transport. People watching UUWHO recently might see some justification for the "consolidation is coming" predictions. On the other hand there are models which are attractive beyond the "we run a backbone and dialup and web hosting and this and that and this and that and what else is on your checklist, oh yah, we do that too or are buying up a company that does it already" as such a model tends to scale poorly vs. the number of working brain cells in any given organization needed to offer reliable and coherent service over time.