On Aug 21, 15:49, "Sean M. Doran" <smd@clock.org> wrote:
This largely works in part because of the origins of Ebone and the people who have worked with it since then, and because Ebone focuses principally on large ISPs. That leads to the assumption that customers aggregate enough traffic that they will use all the capacity they pay for at all times, which also leads to Ebone's no-overbooking design, and consequently to Ebone's rather large cost-based prices relative to its competitors which target vastly different markets, or do massive loss-leading, or do massive cross-subsidy, or all three.
One way of looking at the Ebone backbone is as a large TDM network, much as one could build with ATM and CBR VCs, only without the drawbacks of ATM or a big VC mesh (and with the drawbacks of a complicated router-based network).
There are of course several other pan-European providers such as Unisource's UBN, BT's CIP, UUNET, EUNET, Compuserve, Global -1, and IBM Advantis, each of which appears to function much like their counterparts or analogues in the U.S.A. This, however, is not exactly "line sharing" per se.
You need to study some more (European) Internet history. Among other things, you seem to overlook that the EUnet you know today, as well as our infrastructure (in many ways similar to Ebone's), was a result of political manouvering leading to us being kicked out of Ebone at the time (6-7 years ago). Then the really interesting hard work started, building from the ground while Ebone had its US half circuits paid by the NSF, and Rick Adams lent us a big helping hand during those years. (There is still much confusion caused by the similar names of the two companies, but that's a different story.) As you are probably aware, we have been on very friendly terms with Ebone for several years now. -- ------ ___ --- Per G. Bilse, Director Network Eng & Ops ----- / / / __ ___ _/_ ---- EUnet Communications Services B.V. ---- /--- / / / / /__/ / ----- Singel 540, 1017 AZ Amsterdam, NL --- /___ /__/ / / /__ / ------ tel: +31 20 5305333, fax: +31 20 6224657 --- ------- 24hr emergency number: +31 20 421 0865 --- Connecting Europe since AS286 --- http://www.EU.net e-mail: bilse at domain