| If word gets out that going with a small provider == having | to renumber your corporate hosts regularly, big providers will have | effectively locked small players out of the market... which helps their | pocketbooks at the expense of a lot of other people. Well, I can only speak about one big provider, however I would be surprised if my view is not shared to some extent by at least some of our competitiors, and by all the engineers at ALL of them, no matter what their marketing people have gotten into their heads. Large providers cannot afford to squeeze small providers out of the marketplace. Not one of them has more than a tiny fraction of the customer-support labour resources of the aggregate of their own customers (not to mention customers' customers, and so on and so forth). Indeed, there are more customer-support handholders employed by folks downstream from Sprint around the world than there are people who work for Sprint. Moreover, there are timezone issues, local language issues, and numerous other problems that would have to be dealt with by any large provider attempting to be a worldwide dialup-Internet/local-services provider. I am willing to bet my farm that SprintLink could never support large numbers of dialup end users in a reasonable way and do so in a manner that is cost-competitive with our customers. In fact, the bulk of our cutomers who are reading this message may well quip that SprintLink has done a just barely tolerable job of supporting its current customer base. Moreover, while there is a much stronger corporate committment to SprintLink now than there ever has been in its history, and what looks alot like strong recognition by senior executives that the Internet is Really Different from private data networking services, I don't think anybody really believes we could compete on the customer-support front with two-smart-people-and-a-bunch-of-{modems,ISDN}. Being a large service provider is about pushing the envelope of IP and transmissions technology, about dealing with complicated routing issues, and about supporting large customers better and more cost-effectively than they could do by stringing their own lines among themselves. Being a small service provider is about customer support. Moreover, it's customer support for people whose only exposure to the Internet so far has involved paying too much money to folks like Prodigy. In other words, don't panic about large providers competing directly with local access providers. No customer-support resources, no desire to dry up the substantial revenue we get from more local access providers (some of which are continental in scope, some of which are national in scope, and some of which are local to a state or metropolitan area). Now, what is true is that some of the companies who are big providers have invested lots of money into trademarks and brand names and are keen on keeping themselves visible in the consumer market as something of a household name. Do not be surprised to see, rather than an attempt to squash out local providers, many plans to swing deals with local providers as outsource centres for customer support or as franchises selling lower-end services, that would result in making some small providers much bigger and much richer. Moreover, franchise/outsource deals or no, remember that our goal is to do what we're really good at (providing international backbone connectivity to smart people who don't need very much customer support) and make money doing it. It is not forcing customers to stay with us and us alone that helps our bottom line, it's giving customers enough good service and support that they are a/ happy and b/ in need of MUCH more bandwidth to SprintLink, for which we will happily charge money. So instead of seeing customers multihoming or wanting to be able to multihome as a disease, I see it as a symptom. The disease is that we have a bunch of hardware which must handle enormous loads for which they were never designed, and which we can't replace immediately, because there is no better alternative. Moreover, with respect to some things, such as an ever-increasingly-large-and-flap-prone routing table, there is no ultimate cure except preventative medicine. That medicine is called CIDR (Call it data robitussin?), and helping roll out ANYTHING that will encourage people to avoid increasing the size of routing tables in the routers of the world which are most CPU bound right now. The encouragement, IMHO, should be in the form of the work PIER is addressing (sorry about the pun), some possible future renumbering tools, NATs, or any other technology which results in making a change of addresses painless and quick, so that people have little or no reason to object to using provider-supplied addresses. | At this rate we're going to see the policy change to "each RBOC gets a /7 | out of the old class A space, and then that's it" Have you ever met an RBOC data person? Have you ever met anyone at an RBOC who understands the Internet? Hi Warren! (Well, there's Mark Knopper, I suppose, so there's at least one person at one subsidiary of one RBOC...) You're better off panicking about @Home, who have been hiring some amazingly clueful people, but I think you will find that even they would rather make money off small ISPs than consider them competitors. So, that said, hopefully a little of the Evil Greedy Bastard image will be dispelled in your mind, and a bit of "hm, you know, maybe they aren't lying through their teeth, and maybe this is good for *US* too", might have seeped in. If not, well, then may your days (in the future sometime) of being considered an arch-villain by smaller organizations be at least as interesting as mine. Sean.