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How many enterprises do you see Frank that may begin to understand

Gordon Cook asked: -- they better build their own infrastructure. because perhaps placing all your infrastructures marbles in the equivalent of a new set of twin towers is not a good execution of your fiduciary responsibility to your shareholder...never mind the public at large?<< -- Assuming you're referring to a soup-to-nuts physical layer network, building one's own infrastructure isn't a panacea, and it is not even very often a doable proposition for organizations outside of the government and for companies outside of the Fortunes. Taken to the extreme, customer owned networks, if used as the sole source of transport, defies both the type of robustness that we seek - unless multiple networks per customer are built - and the very form of inter-working demanding of any-to-any end-to-end reach. So, unless it's a situation where great economies can be achieved in support of applications that are relatively local to (or resident solely within the borders of) an enterprise, maybe it's not the end all and be all that we sometimes make it out to be. For a University and Research Consortium, fine. For a forty-state branch banking network that must reach 42,347 end points, with most of those end points producing traffic for a single T1 or T3 line, or even a GbE line over an extended distance, it would appear on the surface "not," although each point solution requires its own evaluation. Volume discounts, the degree of diversity required and security issues all come into play, to name just three areas of concern. Rather, private builds are great for spot solutions, even very large ones, that are relatively constant between two or more points when those points are, likewise, constant and not constantly being relocated. But IMO they do little in the way of extending reach beyond the borders of the enterprise. For service providers, on the other hand, it's more of a financial consideration, assessing tradeoffs against perceived future pricing trends and traffic volumes. Again, to buy, rent or build is something that can only be determined at the time of need, and based on the particulars of the enterprise or service provider. That said, the situation I addressed initially highlights a case where the market had already begun taking care of some of the critical needs of diversity and redundancy for the universe of North American (or at least US) users, which are now about to be trashed in order to satisfy the goals of two corporate entities. Does this make any sense? Of course not. But viewed against the backdrop of this past week's FCC releases, the trend, despite how irrational and ludicrous it may appear, is ringing clear as day. And so it goes ... --- Frank A. Coluccio DTI Consulting Inc. 347-526-6788 Mobile frank@fttx.org ---------- On Mon Aug 8 16:17 , Gordon Cook sent: So although we have the technology to build networks controlled at the edge and networks that are less subject to failure, the old business models that we cant seem to break out of insist that we remonopolize walled garden telephone monopolies. Why? Because we imagine them to have wondrous new capabilities of economy of scale. We concentrate the fiber and the switching centers into evermore centralized potential points of failure. We rob ourselves of redundancy. As with the cisco router monoculture in our backbones which god help us if it ever failed, we are now building a potential concentration of fiber. Higher and potentially more fragile than the twin towers. How sad. How can we gain some understanding of other ways to look at infrastructure? This is terribly short sighted. How many enterprises do you see Frank that may begin to understand they better build their own infrastructure. because perhaps placing all your infrastructures marbles in the equivalent of a new set of twin towers is not a good execution of your fiduciary responsibility to your shareholder...never mind the public at large? ============================================================= The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, 431 Greenway Ave, Ewing, NJ 08618 USA 609 882-2572 (PSTN) 415 651-4147 (Lingo) cook@cookreport.com Subscription info: http://cookreport.com/subscriptions.shtml New report: Where is New Wealth Created? Center or Edge? at: http://cookreport.com/14.07.shtml ============================================================= On Aug 8, 2005, at 1:51 PM, Frank Coluccio wrote:

All,

Tracking the preceding discussion on fiber cuts has been especially interesting for me, with my focus being on the future implications of the pending RBOC mega-mergers now being finalized. The threat that I see resulting from the dual marriages of SBC/AT&T and VZ/MCI will be to drastically reduce the number of options that network planners in both enterprises and xSPs have at their disposal at this time for redundancy and diversity in the last mile access and metro transport layers. And higher than those, too, when integrations are completed.

These mergers will result in the integration and optimization of routes and the closings of certain hubs and central offices in order to allow for the obligatory "synergies" and resulting savings to kick in.. In the process of these efficiencies unfolding, I predict that business continuation planning and capacity planning processes, not to mention service ordering and engineering, will be disrupted to a fare-thee- well, where end users are concerned. The two question that I have are, How long will it take for those consolidations to kick in? and, What will become of the routes that are spun off or abandoned due to either business reasons surrounding synergies or court-ordered due to concentration of powers?

While it's true that an enterprise or ISP cannot pin point where their services are routed, as was mentioned upstream in a number of places, it is at least possible to fairly accurately distinguish routes from disparate providers who are using different rights of way. This is especially true when those providers are 'facilities-based.' However, the same cannot be said for Type- 2 and -3 fiber (or even copper) loop providers who lease and resell fiber, such as Qwest riding piggy-back atop Above.net in an out-of-region metro offering.

But thus far, for the builds that are owned and maintained by Verizon, SBC, MCI/MFS and AT&T/TCG, such differentiations are still possible.

Not only will end users/secondary providers lose out on the number of physical route options that they have at their disposal, but once integration is completed users will find themselves riding over systems that are also managed and groomed in the upstream by a common set of NMS constructs, further reducing the level of robustness on yet higher levels in the stack.

frank@coluccio.net ------

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Eight or nine people I had talked to thought they had geographically distinct ring loops that turned out to be on that one cable when the second cut took it down hard.

Perhaps now people will begin to take physical separacy seriously and write grooming protocols and SLAs into their contracts?

Or was this type of service "good enough"?

--Michael Dillon

Frank A. Coluccio DTI Consulting Inc. 212-587-8150 Office 347-526-6788 Mobile