Sarcasm warning....

From: Sean Doran <smd@icp.net> A couple quick points: the place to go to for this kind of thing should be your direct service provider, who hopefully has some means of communicating with upstream and peer providers when things are going wrong somehow, or at least might be able to give you some additional information.

It should not surprise you that I am no stranger to the folks at my "direct service provider", on either the local or national sides....

NANOG and other lists aren't appropriate places to discuss specific problems. OTOH, general problems, such as how big the Internet is and how saturated well-known-things seem to be and what might be done about it, could be OK here.

IMnsHO, the _only_ way to discuss engineering is with specific problems! NANOG is damn well the appropriate place to discuss _this_ specific problem! The problem is trying to cram the entire world's traffic through a few NAPs, instead of many MIXs. The problem is the outright failure of the design of the first NAPs, particularly the MAE-East "ethernet" and the "ATM" NAPs. The problem is scaling, and the _cheapness_ of the commercial providers in failing to provide widespread interconnections with each other.

I should also note that Sprint and MCI are in the final phases of negotiating direct point-to-point peerings which will pop up in several areas, and improve connectivity between SprintLink and InternetMCI. You wouldn't be far off in expecting this to become something of a trend, particularly among a small number of the large heavy-traffic providers, for whom the NAP/MAE/FIX concepts and models don't seem to be scaling well in practice.

You mean, we might end up with a Network instead of a Treework!?!? Halleluia! Bill.Simpson@um.cc.umich.edu Key fingerprint = 2E 07 23 03 C5 62 70 D3 59 B1 4F 5E 1D C2 C1 A2