New subject: Sprint peering policy

2 Jul 2002

      Perhaps we need NANOG-OldFarts mailing list?
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I think this is putting the cart before the horse.
We were getting upgraded bandwidth capabilities,
fiber put in the ground, etc from traditional Telcos
prior to the rise of the Internet; they were finding cheaper
ways to run phone service around.
This is totally incorrect. Ask anyone who had been in this business from the
beginning of nineties, not late nineties.
How about people who were in the business or doing engineering on WANs
in the late 80s?
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Telcos, while upgrading their
systems, happily pointed at the PUC filings and sold you DS1 that went two
blocks for $700 per month, that being inside a city.
The local loop situation was, and in many cases remains, a major
problem point; at one point, the ISP I was with was paying more for
the last mile from C&W facilities in each city to our POPs than for
the long haul T-1 lines forming the nationwide backbone.

We dropped our total telco costs by about 10% by locating our
main NOC in a building housing C&W and AT&T Longlines facilities
and calling in a contractor with a concrete drill to run
conduit up through our ceiling into the AT&T and C&W 
machine rooms...

All of that said, the long distance lines were already negotiable,
and getting very rapidly more so, in 1991 and 1992.
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The rise of the Internet as a telecom bandwidth demand
driver attracted the attention of investment bankers
and capital, which then became somewhat of a set of
complex feedback loops (capital going into all sorts
of internet industries, infrastructure, etc, partly
because it appeared to be good business and partly
because of hype).  The result was that speculation
and hype drove overcapacity.
This again is incorrect. The rise of content attracted investment bankers.
Oh?  And here I am wondering why the fiber plant growth
started its serious upswing in the late 80s, prior to
the invention of HTTP/HTML.
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Before anyone had invested serious money in any of
the internet infrastructure companies, people were
building out 10 megabit, T3 backbones and were talking
to telco gear providers about what it would take to
do 155 megabit and 622 megabit backbones and so on
and so on.
This is again incorrect. The people that you are talking about were UUNET
and MCI, and we are talking 1994.
That's years too late.  UUNet had some 10 megabit WAN links while
I was still in college, using those crazy 10meg-ethernet-into-SONNET
custom hardware boxes if I remember right.  T3 lines were technically
available and priced by 1990; nobody had the money or customer demand
to justify getting them.  They were being used by telcos to upgrade
their POTS services, but people were already asking what we could
do with them with pure stream IP data, and looking at the OC-3
and OC-12 protocols as they developed, though that was mostly driven
by LAN rather than WAN.
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It was clear to those of us in the late
80s and early 90s that if demand kept pulling, we needed
to keep creating bandwidth.
There had not been demand in 80. Neither had there been demand in the
beginning of 1990s.
Strange.  When I started using the Internet, *the* T-1 backbone wasn't
all done yet.  I got a bad name a couple of times by pulling X11 releases
down from MIT at times of day that it caused noticable delay in the
rest of the country's coast-to-coast IP traffic.  By the time I
graduated college, there were three backbones, and T-1 was no
longer the hottest WAN technology in use.

The demand growth curve goes back a long, long ways, Alex.
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But in no way can you claim that it took a terabuck
in capital push to make it happen.  Demand pull was
fully operational and working just fine before
ISPs started being snapped up by phone companies
and visa versa, and the huge money came into play.
Yes I can. It did take terrabucks to get this industry rolling.
You are mistaking terrabucks invested in capacity push
as opposed to responding to demand pull.

Demand pull is fine; when there's demand, if the cost
model works out, you invest to support it.

Capacity push is speculation on a growth curve.

We didn't need that, though everyone who likes dark
fiber now is acting like a kid in a candy shop since
a terabuck or so was wasted on overprovisioning it...
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Hype might have been lower and growth somewhat
slower, but I can easily see the set of people
who were building out backbones with T-1s and 
the early fiber links having grown them up to
networks capable of today's traffic.
Are you talking about Net99 here?
I can't even remember what year Net99 kicked off...
Must have been what, 1994?  I was chatting with
Joe Stroup by cellphone from my inlaws place
during their pre-launch nationwide tour, and the
inlaws moved in there in 1994.

Yes... Cook report 3.07 summary, Sept/Oct 94,
seems to confirm that timing.  Announced late 94,
rolled out early 95.  [Side note: Gordon, for historical
purposes, would it be unreasonable if we asked you to
make the full reports freely available if they're
older than say 5 years?  3 years?  Or are you
still making money off the archaic gathering dust
ones ... 8-) ]

1995 is not going back nearly far enough.

I'm talking about pre-CIX (remember that?).
Pre-NAPs.  Pre-any-telcos-routing-IP.

Man, 1992-4 were busy years, though.

-george william herbert
gherbert@retro.com

Re: Sprint peering policy

George William Herbert

Gordon Cook

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