-----Original Message----- From: Fletcher E Kittredge [mailto:fkittred@gwi.net] Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2001 11:35 AM To: Kavi, Prabhu Cc: 'Vadim Antonov'; Christian Kuhtz; nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: MPLS VPNs or not?

On Wed, 8 Aug 2001 08:56:53 -0400 "Kavi, Prabhu" wrote:

...

I guess the real question should be how much market cap did other companies lose because of certain people's zealotry? Any answers Vadim?

Prabhu;

What evidence do you have that:

1) UUnet is/was a success,

My take is that the best measures of success is market acceptance and profitability. Not a perfect measure, but certainly beats alternatives like academic debates like protocol X is evil, or service provider Y sucks. If protocol X is evil, ISPs will not use it, or those that do use it will fail. If protocol X was useful but has outlived its usefulness (e.g. ATM in the core), ISPs will no longer use it. [Note that I am not against academic discussions. However they are only useful until market deployment has proven them right or wrong. The people who are still against ATM on religous grounds should get over it.] If service provider Y sucks, then customers will leave it. Neither happened to UUNET.

2) if it was a success, the determining factor was its use of ATM, rather than its first mover advantage, financial/management stucture, industry trends, etc. For example, UUnet used ATM because that was what the bellheads would sell them. At the time, there was no alternative to the bellheads.

First of all, UUNET got a lot of things right. As Craig said, they were an excellent ISP. Those factors you mentioned were all important. However a significant roadblock in any one area can slow down your growth. At one time, UUNET's traffic was simply outrunning the ability of L3 routers to keep up. Their choices were to: 1. Adapt to another network architecture that scaled 2. Have a poor network that did not scale, and therefore would drop lots of customer traffic 3. Refuse customers that wanted to sign on. Taking positions 2 or 3 would have caused them to lose market share. They took position 1 and, combined with doing many other things right, maintained their growth. And as I already mentioned in another message, UUNET's network ran directly over TDM. I don't know what you mean about what the Bellheads would sell them. Prabhu

regards, fletcher