Just to confirm, what Gordon said about the Bellcore/AADS/PB funding arrangement is true. AADS and PB do not receive any money from NSF for NAPs. Bellcore receives a small amount for coordinating the project, and for some network management research.

Does the $2K (per month?) for connecting to the MFS NAP/MAE include access costs, or just the colocation charge? Dave

It includes access. Our 10mbit connection to MAE-East is not *at* MAE-East, but at one of the "on-net" buildings that MFS has wired with fiber. ("Lit", actually). In fact, there are 4 MAE-East connections there, 2 10mbit, a T3, and a 100mbit FDDI connection. And the 100mbit FDDI connections are a great deal: $5000/mo dedicated; $4250/mo on the shared FDDI ring. All prices include local loops to on-net buildings or space (which should soon again become available) at MAE-East. Until the Gigaswitch was in, it was easy to see how they made money - etherswitches and Netedge boxes aren't *that* expensive, plus since MAE-East was originally mostly colocated stuff, they made money on the local loops (well, MFS Telecom did). And up here in Philadelphia, MFS is taking a T3 to Pennsauken and providing 4 10mbit connections off of it for $4k/month. They make out great on the deal the customers save a few thousand a month until they need a FDDI connection/co-location (which isn't available now @ SprintNAP anyway). MFS asked about doing a MAE-Philadelphia but my advice was that the bigger entities would show up at Pennsauken. Net Access is working on a Frame/SMDS peering plan - the RFC will go out to the ISPs/NSPs with Frame connectivity later this month. Basically, those providers with T1 frame and/or multi- megabit SMDS connections may want to peer with each other over the Bell clouds to keep some traffic local, independant of larger peering plans. Avi