In reply to your message of Sun, 14 Apr 1996 12:28:49 CDT: | >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. In an attempt to squash distractors, it makes no sense to me to hold an ISP accountable for failure of a customer to pay for services adequate to their needs, and I also fail to see the relevance of a customer's burying themselves due to internal politics (which you indicate is the case). Also, in an allegedly politically divided house, it doesn't make sense to ascribe the lack of perspicacity to the entire organization; Apple has some great people running it's Internet stuff, and apparently some not so great people. None of this has anything do with a discussion of Internet routing policy issues. What is relevant to a discussion of routing policy issues ;-) is that if free market economics are not a viable means of producing a stable and happy Net (and I'm not saying they aren't! :-), then the alternative is to have regulated services where such things as equal and fair access can be defined and then inflicted on the participants in the industry. The current trend is away from regulation, and towards market economics. As such, Sprint is fully within their rights, and one could argue their charter to their stockholders, to act as they best see fit to meet their service commitments to their customers. Yeah, it makes a mess, as do a lot of other decisions which are economically motivated rather than philosophically motivated. But that's both a consequence and a challenge of transitioning from a Federally funded model to a market funded model. In theory, the market dynamics will support the ISP's offering the best connectivity, and as that dynamic comes more into play things will begin to sort themselves out. History also tells us that market dynamics favor large organizations and monopolies over small ones, hence the predictions of the coming shakeout. However, logically the current state of congestion flux on the net is a near perpetual one; either the providers will continue to improve service to meet growing customer demand, which will in turn generate more congestion, and so on on a perpetual curve of near-stability. Or, service will degrade until customer load diminishes, at which point the same type of near-stability is achieved. I don't see this model changing much until there is enough bandwidth, and enough equipment to drive it, to handle full-motion video to every home and desktop. I could be wildly mistaken; however, Dave O'leary's recent detail of the Net's history does suggest that this is, in fact, the norm and not the exception as far as Net traffic behavior and loading goes. Which means that regardless of what Sprint and other ISP's do to stabilize their services, unless there is a sudden regulatory frenzy there's not much to be done except to ride the wave of expansion out as best as can be done. .02, Cheers, Paul Paul "Corwin" Frommeyer Work Internet Engineer, CCIE Play ISP Systems Engineer Network Sorcerer At Large Cisco Systems, Inc. Paul's Fone Company pfrommey@cisco.com corwin@palas.com *** Speaking solely for myself unless otherwise noted ***