Boasting is fine until economic realities start to affect your bottom line. I always held to the opinion that stratification of Internet is inevitable.
I agree one way to improve the bottom line is one-way settlements. But, if you want to charge to use your facilities, don't be surprised to see a toll booth when you try to use my facilities. On the other hand, if you want free access to my network, I expect a reciprocal agreement for access to your network. I'd rather avoid Mr. Doran's vision of which provider can out last their screaming customers longer. At least when ANS tried this last time, they offered to compensate some of the mid-level networks for some of the investment made in local and regional networks.
Neither it is a bad phenomenon per se -- it reflect shifing of Internet being add-on service to being a core business of facilities based telecom companies. The ultimate win will be a network which is a lot more useful, with solid and sustainable business model.
The Internet seems to have been incredibly successful by not following the traditional telco way of doing business. I don't know why the facilities based telecom companies model would produce a more useful, solid or sustainable business model just because it is being thought up by a manager at a facilities based telecom company. How is that marketing plan for ISDN coming along? Billion dollar companies can have bad ideas too. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation