Paul Vixie wrote: --- i completely understand that acquisition is a common and valid means to grow a business. however, with closed peering as a way of life for our industry, a lot of deals are done which only make money for the investment bankers and don't actually "grow business". closed peering is all about greed and not about service levels, competitive pricing, or overall sector health. closed peering is a bad business model. it shirks fiduciary duty to long-term equity holders in order to give periodic "quick hits" to short-term holders. closed peering proceeds from a Highlander-like premise "there can be only one" when in fact there could be many, and if there were many then the industry overall would be healthier. --- Agreed completely. BUT, your logic is very much "perfect world". There are a quite few reasons why this doesn't work "in the real world", same as communism works great in theory, but not in the real world. Eg: #1 Do you honestly believe that you wont run into any customers who will say "why should I buy from abovenet if I can peer with them? They will take a big percentage of my traffic and do it for free." *IF* you could have a setup where you could peer AND buy at the same time, then your model works better. #2 When something is being done for free, it is often not being done as well as if it were paid for, case in point: AboveNet's link to NY-IIX is 100mbit, right? The MRTG graphs seem to indicate that it is, AND that it was doing 90 megabit for several months straight. Shouldn't this have been upgraded to gig-e? Not cost effective? That being said, I like what above net does, and what they stand for, I just don't see how it can possibly make money. --Phil