Catching up on my email after tax week (did anyone else notice that there were a lot fewer postings on this and other lists this past week?):
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! Nor is this attitude unique to Sean. Since my local ISP and NSP is Merit/MichNet, and I am an advocate of more regional exchanges, I have been trying to get them to interconnect with other local providers, so that local traffic wouldn't have to go through MAE-East (and suffer 30%-50% losses) to travel 3 blocks across town. They never managed to do anything in 3 years, despite the willingness of others (specifically MSEN) to interconnect. 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. Likewise, a lot of traffic from Ann Arbor Michigan to Columbus Ohio travels via MAE-East, despite the fact that Merit is already connected to CICnet, which is in turn connected to Columbus (both OSU and OARnet). The problem is, Merit has no "bi-lateral peering" with CICnet. Merit doesn't think there is a "cost benefit" to have regional interconnection and peering relationships. In some respects, they are right. The benefit is not to Merit itself, but rather to its customers (lower delays), and the rest of the Internet (less congestion at other exchanges). 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.
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, 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.
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.... So, let's see some of that vaunted reliability first, please. WSimpson@UMich.edu Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32 BSimpson@MorningStar.com Key fingerprint = 2E 07 23 03 C5 62 70 D3 59 B1 4F 5E 1D C2 C1 A2