Boasting is fine until economic realities start to affect your bottom line. I always held to the opinion that stratification of Internet is inevitable.
I agree one way to improve the bottom line is one-way settlements. But, if you want to charge to use your facilities, don't be surprised to see a toll booth when you try to use my facilities. On the other hand, if you want free access to my network, I expect a reciprocal agreement for access to your network. I'd rather avoid Mr. Doran's vision of which provider can out last their screaming customers longer. At least when ANS tried this last time, they offered to compensate some of the mid-level networks for some of the investment made in local and regional networks.
Neither it is a bad phenomenon per se -- it reflect shifing of Internet being add-on service to being a core business of facilities based telecom companies. The ultimate win will be a network which is a lot more useful, with solid and sustainable business model.
The Internet seems to have been incredibly successful by not following the traditional telco way of doing business. I don't know why the facilities based telecom companies model would produce a more useful, solid or sustainable business model just because it is being thought up by a manager at a facilities based telecom company. How is that marketing plan for ISDN coming along? Billion dollar companies can have bad ideas too. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation
Boasting is fine until economic realities start to affect your bottom line. I always held to the opinion that stratification of Internet is inevitable.
I agree one way to improve the bottom line is one-way settlements. But, if you want to charge to use your facilities, don't be surprised to see a toll booth when you try to use my facilities. On the other hand, if you want free access to my network, I expect a reciprocal agreement for access to your network. I'd rather avoid Mr. Doran's vision of which provider can out last their screaming customers longer.
At least when ANS tried this last time, they offered to compensate some of the mid-level networks for some of the investment made in local and regional networks.
This is the key idea that UUNet seems to have missed; free access, or pay access, must go both ways. UUNet seeks to charge for access by other providers to UUNet's customers without being charged for its customers access to the other providers customers. There are elements of sensible business planning in why this is happening ... the very big providers have to pay for nationwide T3 networks to run traffic around the country that smaller providers don't, and that hurts the big ones in comparason. It is somewhat unfair to put the whole burden of those big backbones on big carriers and the big carriers customers. On the other hand, if a midsized ISP shows up at several peering points, with at least one in each major region of the country, so bigger ISPs don't have to do all the countrywide backhauling for the smaller ISP, then that justification fails completely. What is left, once a smaller ISP does that, is simply UUNet being bigger and wanting more, and doing so in a hostile manner towards smaller ISPs without good economic justification could be construed as antitrust violations as well as other problems. -george william herbert gherbert@crl.com Speaking only for myself, I don't work for CRL
participants (2)
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George Herbert -
Sean Donelan