From: Sean Doran <smd@icp.net> It's because I'm an evil asshole determined to protect my employer's interests and make our shareholders rich.
This is somewhat incompatible with protecting the interests of our competitors and enriching their shareholders.
Gentlefolk, while I agree that Sean has been "mostly" right on many technical issues, I am seriously unhappy with this attitude!
Bill, here is why you will never be taken seriously be any ISP/NSP. If networks can't find ways to cooperaate without prodecting there own interests, we all might as well give up now. THE ONLY WAY TO BUILD A SCALABLE INTERNET IS FOR PROVIDERS TO BE MOTIVATED BY SELF INTEREST AND ECONOMIC FACTORS. You cannot build a multi billion/trillion dollar system based on happy thoughts. Sean is "mostly" right on techincal issues, because that is what he is good at, and when REAL WORLD technical issues, dictate policy, there isn't much choice for folks like Sean. You would do just as good slamming Cisco for limiting AGS+'s memory size, or processor speed in 7000 series routers, which BTW where a lot of Seans technical issues that cause these policies too happen.
Recently, I asked why they aren't connected to the Detroit NAP. The response was "everyone else should connect to MichNet, and pay our affiliate fee". I noted that the others consider themselves competitors, and taking the same attitude would expect Merit to instead pay THEM, since MichNet generates the most traffic.
This is typical of the NSFNet regional attituded. The more cluefull ones DO connect to Naps (Sesquinet is at Mae-Houston, for example).
Likewise, a lot of traffic from Ann Arbor Michigan to Columbus Ohio [ example delete ] The problem is that ISPs are allowed to shove their regional connectivity out to others on the Internet. In effect, the _rest_ of the Internet is _paying_ for the regional underprovisioning.
This is exaclty an issue of customer education, If customers wanted good connectity they CAN find it.
Personally, I have little patience for the small and not-very-clueful who want to be direct competitors with a multibillion dollar company with lots of talent and who are taken to whining about my policies and those of my colleagues and associates, and even those of our competitors. This uncharitable attitude obviously does not endear me to them.
But your attitude that the whiners are "small and not-very-clueful" is less than useless. There are some quite clueful folks that don't agree with your policies, particularly with the failure to peer (and exchange traffic) with everyone else (even small folks) at an exchange. (Sprint is not the only perpetrator of this poor policy.)
The fact is, that vast majority of the whiners are SMALL, and have virtually no experience operating large scale regional or national backbones. Sprint and others have VERY GOOD operational reasons for their policy, largely some network is better than no network. Six months ago, if Sprint had peered with everyone that asked, their entire network would have melted down. (Sean correct me if I'm wrong here.)
The fact is, whether you like it or not, they _ARE_ your competitors in their specific regions. But, to thrive, the Internet has a long tradition of _cooperation_ among competitors.
Kinda misses the meaning of "exchange". That hurts everyone else on the net, by increased delay and more congestion elsewhere.
In short, you are asking _others_ to bear the costs of _your_ making money. We've seen this time and again, such as the UK provider who sends all their traffic to the US, which then uses the congested US to Europe links. It only saves them money because others were unknowingly bearing the cost. Sounds like a form of fraud to me.
We if this is the case whoever is paying for those congested links is not getting their monies worth. If they were paying enough for thier bandwidth this wouldn't even been an issue, and largely is an issue of legacy subsdies.
I would hope, though, that the bulk of our customers would be much happier with us driving towards a network reliable enough that they don't have to worry about their customers screaming (not to mention not having to worry about facing some very difficult scaling problems we are already staring at), than with us being the Department of Warm and Fuzzy Feelings.
All of them know full well that the drive ain't easy.
True. But there are some particular bones to pick with Sprint, like the underprovisioned Texas links that kept dropping out, just when Apple released its 7.5.3 MacOS Update to developers from Texas....
Hm.. maybe Apple should have thought a little more about their little T-1 link to a single provider when they had about 3 T-1s worth of data to send. I offer to sell more connectivity to Apple, but they WEREN'T interested. They didn't care that there application/distribution model was broken, and breaking the net, they didn't want to fork out the extra bucks, or deal with the internal politics to put the release out on the West coast where they had a much higher bandwidth connection.
So, let's see some of that vaunted reliability first, please.
WSimpson@UMich.edu BSimpson@MorningStar.com
I haven't seen many reports of Sprint problems since Sprint put its policies in places and they had time work.o MCI on the other hand has been bleeding about 30% packets out of San Francisco, on its OWN INTERAL network for several MONTHS. Strangely about the same time as the problems started showing up, MCI changed some of its polcies too... So it looks like to me, Sprint 3, WSimpson 0. For those remain NETWORK OPERATORS, I propose a mailing list for certified network operators, say must be peering at 2 NAPs with at least 3 peers, or multihomed, to post to the list. This should completely elimiate the problem with whining and people trying to "define" the internet backbone. -- Jeremy Porter, Freeside Communications, Inc. jerry@fc.net PO BOX 80315 Austin, Tx 78708 | 1-800-968-8750 | 512-339-6094 http://www.fc.net