In a message written on Mon, Aug 06, 2012 at 01:49:07AM -0500, jamie rishaw wrote:
discuss.
It's a short sighted result created by the lack of competition. IP access is a commodity service, with thin margins that will only get thinner. Right now those margins are being propped up in many locations by monopoly or near-monopoly status, which creates a situation where companies neither need to compete on features and service quality nor do they need to turn to those areas to maintain a profit. If there was meaningful competition, the margin on raw IP access would decline and companies would have to turn to value-add services to maintain a profit margin. From the simple up-sell of a static IP address that some do today, to a fee for BGP, a fee for DDOS mitigation, and so on. These are all things it's not uncommon to see when buying service in carrier netural colos where there is competition. There is no technological problem here. BGP to the end user has a cost. The current business climate is causing people to cut all possible costs and offering no incentive to innvovate and up-charge. Which leads to an interesting question. If on top of your $100/month "business class Internet" the provider were to charge $50/month for "BGP Access" to cover their costs of having a human configure the session, larger access gear to handle the routes, and larger backbone gear to deal with a larger routing table, would you still be as gung ho about BGP to the business? -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/