See my comments below...
-----Original Message----- From: David Barak [mailto:thegameiam@yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2001 1:14 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Cc: dan@netrail.net; jeblinton@corp.earthlink.net; peeringresistance@yahoo.com Subject: Peering, Large ISPs, and You
I'll interleave my comments.
Quoth Daniel Golding:
The large ISPs have finally started to work together, to potentially exclude smaller providers. That isn't good.
are you arguing that the situation of the past several years does NOT exclude smaller providers? Most of the really big ISPs (you know who you are) rely primarily on private peering already. How exactly does this change matters?
Smaller providers have certainly felt the squeeze. This changes matters because previously the big players were working seperately, with distinct sets of rules. From my reading of these comments, it looks like they are starting to work together, and plan jointly. If this is true (and at least one non-anonymous poster has seemed to confirm it), than thats bad.
Certain colo facilities are being choosen. Others are not. This has a major business impact on the ones who aren't choosen.
s 'are being'/'had been' and you'll see that this is not only nothing new, it's nothing which is particularly undesireable. In fact, you can look at this as colo-competition - those colo spaces which provide services which the really big ISPs want will get their business.
Yes. But previously, all these ISPs made independent decisions, which encouraged competition. If all of them jointly choose a single player in a certain market, thats bad for competition. That has NOT happened previously.
Earthlink is a huge consumer of transit bandwidth, so it would seem to be in your shareholder's best interest to keep competition high, and thus keep prices low.
True. So tell me this: how will providers reducing their costs on settlement-free interconnections cause overall costs to rise? If anything, this period of severe cost-sensitivity should drive the really big ISPs to pay very close attention to pricing, in an attempt to maintain and maximize revenue.
There are numerous examples of this in real life. The best one if the airline industry. At any rate, once the pricing variability is taken out of the transit game, syncing of pricing will happen. There seems to be a hope that this will supress pricing. This may happen, although it is difficult to see how transit can be delivered, at a profit, for lower prices. But be careful to see the other side of the coin - it makes price increases much easier.
-David Barak "Quis custodes ipsos custodiet?" - Juvenal
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- Dan