On Mon, 15 January 2001, Steve Meuse wrote:

Then you have not made the same investment in infrastructure, and therefore are not a *peer*.

That sounds like the same argument AT&T made when MCI tried to connect to its network. AT&T currently has a market capitalization of $91 Billion MCI/Worldcom currently has a market capitalization of $63 Billion Sprint currently has a market capitalization of $25 Billion Genuity currently has a market capitalization of $5 Billion Yep, I would say Genuity is not a peer of either AT&T, Sprint or Worldcom. Interconnection should be based on technical performance standards, not on the size of your balance sheet. I understand writing a performance based requirement is much harder than a prescriptive based requirement. Prescriptive: You will use OC-12 circuits. Performance: You will be able to carry 150 Mbps of sustained traffic for 5 minutes with less than 1% packet loss. If you want to use OC-12 circuits, great. If you want to use ATM, great. If you want to use quantum transfer, great. What I object to is the requirement to make the "same" investment, i.e. make the same mistakes. Perhaps I wanted to make my investment in circuits between the US and South America, so I have 150Mbps to Rio. This is essentially the argument that Telstra has been making to the UN and ITU. Telstra makes very large investments in its part of the world, some might argue even more than Worldcom invests. But because Telstra doesn't sell service in Virginia, none of that investment "counts."