Both Stephen and Jeff and correct. And Im not sure it would be in the best interests of the colo company to be a jack of all trades. Where I do see a benefit are where an exch pt company wants to start a new one in a new city. It's the classic chicken and the egg. Where I have promoted allowing a beta group of peers to jump in for little or no charge till say peer #6, another solution is to connect that new exch pt to a successful one at another location. Allowing the benefit of new peers at location B to see old peers at location A. This would allow a critical mass of peers immediately, and would allow customer 1 to see benefit. Some restrictions might have to be in place. 1) Limiting the traffic levels for distance peering. 100meg or 1 Gig would do it 2) Perhaps a time limit Also, instead of competing with carriers at this new location B, you would actually prove there is business there. Most companies are in a wait and see mode before deploying, or a wait and get an order 1st mode. By jump starting the peering with transport, you then have the data the carrier engineers need to justify a build. This IS one way to get more successful peering points started. At 10:05 -0500 1/3/03, Jeff Barrows wrote:
- Transit providers who came to the exchange point for the purpose of picking up transit sales.
- If the exchange point operator is the one carrying the traffic, they lose for competing with their customers in the previous bullet; they will have taken the first steps on the path from being an exchange point operator to being a network-plus-colo provider (where they'll compete with the network-plus-colo providers just coming out of bankruptcy with all their debt scraped off).
i'm still amazed that nobody has brought up the fact that a couple of the larger colo/exchange operators that claimed they wouldn't compete with their IP customers are indeed selling IP transit-- intentionally undercutting the prices of the providers that colo'd there to sell transit partly because the colo/exchange operator kept telling the world that they would never compete with their customers in the IP transit space.
clearly, interconnecting their exchange points to create a richly- connected Internet 'core' is a natural progression if their customers don't complain too loudly.
not that it's a bad long-term plan-- but I do agree with Stephen in that it'll be tough for them to survive against the debt-free big boys if they emerge as clear network-plus-colo competitors and lose the few remaining bits of their 'neutral' facade.
- jsb
-- Jeff Barrows, President Firefly Networks http://FireflyNetworks.net +1 703 287 4221 Voice +1 703 288 4003 Facsimile
An Advanced Internet Engineering & Professional Services Organization
-- David Diaz dave@smoton.net [Email] pagedave@smoton.net [Pager] www.smoton.net [Peering Site under development] Smotons (Smart Photons) trump dumb photons