On Tue, 13 Feb 1996, Jonathan Heiliger wrote:
Wow, so we just do this in a few hundred places and you've lowered the overall routing table by 8 * N(hundred). The main problem, as we all know, is this isn't a stable marketplace. Not only is there fierce competition for staff, but also for customers. Why would a number of small providers want join together?
Well actually, there isn't a fierce competition for customers and I somehow doubt that there is much competition for staff. The market is growing by leaps and bounds. The value of the Internet exists only because service providers work co-operatively and exchange traffic with each other. In just about every market there are STILL new startup ISP's who are succeeding. Yes, there are failures, but the failure rate is very low and it's only the most incompetent fools or incredibly unlucky ISP's who are having problems. There are definitely advantages for a lot of small ISP's banding together by buying access through a 3rd-party exchange point. One is that they now gain the benefit of the exchange point's technical staff. The small ISP needn't learn all the details about BGP peering because the exchange point does it for him. And when the exchange point technical people can help out the small ISP's (their customers) with technical problems that are beyond the ability of the small ISP's own staff. There is a limit to the size an ISP can grow to and still provide top-notch quality service. In every market I am aware of, ISP's who focus on quality service are reaping the rewards in spite of often higher prices than their competition. Therefore I believe that the market naturally has room for many small ISP's and will continue to do so. The "exchange point" concept also provides opportunities for the more technically sophisticated ISP's who are tired of handholding dialup customers. Many new dialup customers have NEVER USED A COMPUTER BEFORE! Anyway, such an ISP can drop or de-emphasize their dialup services and become an exchange point by focussing on providing leased-line services to other ISP's. How is this relevant? Well, if you want to encourage greater aggregation in the global Internet, one way to do so is to explain to ISP's how a more structured Internet can be of benefit to them by allowing them to focus on a market niche and become real good at that rather than try to be a jack-of-all-trades ISP who hasn't time to do any one thing very well. This kind of structure may make it easier to get knowledge about renumbering filtered down to the masses or it may indeed make renumbering less urgent. Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022 Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com