On Fri, 2 May 1997, Stephen Balbach wrote:
First it was AGIS (but who cares about AGIS?). Now UUNET. Tomorrow who? MCI? As UUNET and others of the big five move to consolidate their markets.......... let UUNET put the smaller national backbones against the wall and whom do the rest of ISP's have to rely on? Those ISPs who did not get hit in UUNET's first round of cuts. Will you get it in the neck in the second or the third round?
The only thing UUNET is cutting is Internet trees, and there are some who are protesting by hugging them. Clear out the chaff for next seasons crops.
Buying connectivity from an ISP who peers with UUNET, or buying direct from UUNET, is a lot cheaper then building a national DS-3/OC-3 backbone and trying to be default free - this is not about UUNET cuting throats, it's about large and small ISP's examining thier business model.
Sure, if UUNET was only cutting peering with small ISPs who were only at one NAP, and had peering because of a backdoor deal years ago. It appears that UUNET is cutting peering with those medium-sized ISPs who *have* built a national DS-3/OC-3 backbone. I really don't see how squeezing the medium-sized ISPs who have already invested the millions of dollars it takes to build a national backbone helps anyone but UUNET. I see this as a direct attack on the smaller regional and national ISPs who have been taking customers away from UUNET because of better performance and better service. The issue here isn't getting other ISPs to examine their business model. If an ISP has already installed a national network, they have either done their research, figured their costs and potential gains, and invested the money wisely, or they are made of money, and since few ISPs I know of are made of money, I'll bet they did the background work. One of the reasons to install a national network is that some large ISPs state flat-out that they won't consider peering unless you are are connected to a certain number of naps with at at least T3/OC3 speeds, which is a reasonable requirement, but to tell someone that, and then either raise the standards to an illogical level (guess which national ISP said someone would have to have at least 100 coast-to-coast T3s to even be considered for peering recently) or just plain terminate peering with all but the largest ISPs seems underhanded at best. It's UUNET's network, and they can do what they want with it, but UUNET/Worldcom/MFS won't be getting much more business from us if these actions continue. ________ \______/ Jeremiah Kristal \____/ Network Operations \__/ IDT Internet Services \/ jeremiah@hq.idt.net 201-928-4454