How about giving us a brief description of what the Savvis model is?

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I've seen several comments over the last year or so about how Savvis doesn't follow the "Savvis model".

As far as I understand it, the Savvis model was to set up "PNAPs" (private NAPs) which have a DS-3 from UUNet, Sprint and (at the time) MCI. There were something like 8 of these across the country. The PNAPs were interconnected with their own (probably public ATM) network, and that same network was supplemented with public peering at the public NAPs. At one piont, Savvis was offering one-hop (logical) connectivity to all 8 PNAPs for customers who could do ATM, but when I called about it, it had apparently died before it made it off the drawing board. The idea was that they could build a network with all of the performance (and more) of the Big 3, from the start. Technically, it seems to make a lot of sense. The question always was whether it made sense financially. Another question: if Savvis no longer follows the "Savvis model", what model do they follow? Their Web site [1] still talks about direct transit to each PNAP, though I noticed that they removed a lot of the information that used to be there (diagrams, etc). Are they moving to more centralized peering/transit arrangements, like the rest of the backbones? Is Savvis still considered to have a technically unusual backbone design? How is it that they can offer the SLA [2] they do (guaranteed average RTT anywhere on the internet < 200ms, guaranteed average packet loss < 5%, 100% uptime) without a different network design? Pete. [1] http://www.savvis.com/why_network_info.html http://www.savvis.com/about.html http://www.savvis.com/about_locations.html [2] http://www.savvis.com/network/sla.html