--On Wednesday, April 27, 2005 3:50 -0700 "william(at)elan.net" <william@elan.net> wrote:
On Wed, 27 Apr 2005, Owen DeLong wrote:
Yes, most water transit companies are also the water supply company,
Water supply comes from rivers, lakes, etc. While water company take water from those sources, they do not produce it and just take what they can get, clean it up and then deliver around the city.
In many places, the company that obtains and filters the water from these various sources and the company that delivers it to end users are different companies. That is what my analogy speaks of. An example would be Palo Alto, California. The City of San Francisco obtains and processes the water from Hetch Hetchi and other sources. They then sell it to the city of Palo Alto which maintains it's own pumping resources and pipelines to deliver to the end users. In this case, the city of Palo Alto is analogous to the ISP. The city of San Francisco is analogous to the end node.
but, in my analogy, and, in some areas, as a matter of fact, they are not the same. The chemical tampering of which you speak is done by the water supply company at the supply point before it is put in the pipes for transit to the end user.
I've heard that Israel is considering (or buying already?) water from Turkey. Do you really think they are going to just deliver it as is or do you think the water company will clean it up on the local level before delivering it to the homes?
That depends, I guess, on the quality of water that Turkey delivers and the SLA that Israel expects. An example of what the situation I describe is above, and, it is real.
And BTW - you do realize "contamination" on the Internet usually at the source, right?
Right... Exactly my point. Solving source point contamination in the transit network isn't a good idea.
The water delivery company runs said pipes, and, my expectation from them is that they deliver what they got from the water supply company without any additional contaminants.
If the water supply was contaminated, I'd fully expect water delivery company to clean it up before delivering to me.
In many cases, the water delivery company has no ability or facility to do so. I expect them to deliver clean water. Frankly, I don't care too much whether they act as a supply company or a delivery company, so long as they deliver clean water. My point was that it is perfectly acceptable for a delivery only company to deliver without additives or filtration. Sure, in the case of water, since the delivery company is choosing the source point, they have some additional responsibilities with regard to the source quality, but, that isn't the case in the internet. The end user is choosing the source, and, the ISP is a pure delivery company.
Think of the web hoster as a water supply company. The household user is an end user. The ISP is merely a pipeline.
In any case, I don't think this is quite the correct analogy.
Any analogy will break if you pick at it hard enough.
Water company usually delivers from just one (ok, maybe not one for larger areas but its in lower tens order) source and have typically control (directly or indirectly with signed agreement) over the source.
Yes.
If you want to compare this to ISP, it would be like me having peering agreement and direct connection with few dozen content providers and only giving access to users to those few dozen websites.
Perhaps I should have used electric companies as a better example. Owen