From: Steve Sobol [mailto:sjsobol@NorthShoreTechnologies.net] Sent: Monday, May 14, 2001 2:18 PM
[I don't know that I agree that this is off-topic...]
I'm with you here.
Steve Schaefer wrote:
1) ISP's who deploy DSL are on a very slim margin. They can't afford to be "full service." That doesn't mean that the best DSL ISP's don't provide better service than the mediocre or poor DS-1 ISP's, but don't expect $500/month support for your $150/month line.
I disagree with this characterization. Quite a few of those businesses would gladly pay a few shekels more, for a decent SLA and some service. The problem is in how you stratify the market. There are also market aggregation issues (crossed with excessive greed).
2) Data CLEC's who provide most of the lines for independent ISP's have a challenging business model. Northpoint went down hard. That doesn't mean that the others will go down hard, too, but they have the same kind of risks. They needed lots of capital and got most of it through debt financing.
Debt financing is okay, as long as you don't overstate your sales projections. Homes/business' passed isn't [the same as] homes/business' online. Getting them online is the actual gross revenue (minus delinquencies) and you have to have your payment terms fall under some reasonable percentage of that. What many of them did was ass-u-me a larger percentage of plant utilization (ie x plant generates y sales, over z months). The sales didn't ramp up, or the delinquency rate went out of sight, and predictable results followed. It's no different with public offerings. Not making your dividend payments is about the equivalent of not making your loan payments. It's all credit.
Well, wasn't the big problem that the DLECs were having trouble turning around orders, and as a result ended up not getting paid by the ISPs?
Maybe. Looking at the Covad v. DSLnetworks case, Covad let DSLnetworks get about 18 months in arrears. It certainly smells like bad management of receiveables. How many of you guys would let arrearages age more than 90 days, regardless of the reason. At worst, you convert it to a prommisory note, or some other debt instrument, with re-payment terms spelled out in their BoD's blood.
3) ILEC's don't have a clue. Some of them are well-intentioned
to say about both Verizon and Ameritech. Ameritech was fair-to-middling until being bought by SBC, and they rolled downhill rapidly
Having witnessed SBC takover of PacBell, from the inside (PacBell ACN/CBS), it was most amusing to watch San Ramone meeting San Antone. I absolutely knew that the HFC system was going to get cut, at the minimum. SBC track-record isn't real good and they're not all that nice to work for.
Here in Cleveland, Ameritech offers only ADSL. I am not sure they even know what SDSL is. :) They will, however, be happy to sell you 1.5x256 ADSL for $175 a month!
PacBell does NOT offer SDSL, which is pretty much a requirement for most business usage. ADSL is only good as a [barely] competitive offering against residential cable. BTW, other than DSLnetworks failure, my DSL line has been rock solid for over 2 years. Every problem I've had was an upstream failure. You can't fault xDSL technology, only the business' behind it. The technology that can be faulted, and I sincerely apologize for not being clear enough on this, is that which prevents adequate redundancy at the end-nodes. The fact that 100,000 businesses can get lopped off by a single provider business failure is pretty sad. I've tried, for over a year, to get redundant uplinks to an alternate provider (ISDN backup to xDSL). CIDR, prefix filtering, and cluelessness nail that effort every time. It doesn't seem to matter that I am more than willing to pay for it. It simply isn't available. But, it should be (I don't mean tinker-toy methods either). Before CIDR, it was. The past few quarters has shown how necessary it is. Guys, this is a huge market gap, why isn't anyone filling it? -- ROELAND M.J. MEYER Managing Director Morgan Hill Software Company, Inc. TEL: +001 925 373 3954 FAX: +001 925 373 9781 http://www.mhsc.com mailto: rmeyer@mhsc.com
Not to mention that if you're looking to do BGP, most providers won't think of letting you run BGP over anything that's not at least a T1. When I was at Intermedia, we didn't even let customer do BGP over frame relay - they had to have a fractional T1 service at minimum. -C
The technology that can be faulted, and I sincerely apologize for not being clear enough on this, is that which prevents adequate redundancy at the end-nodes. The fact that 100,000 businesses can get lopped off by a single provider business failure is pretty sad. I've tried, for over a year, to get redundant uplinks to an alternate provider (ISDN backup to xDSL). CIDR, prefix filtering, and cluelessness nail that effort every time. It doesn't seem to matter that I am more than willing to pay for it. It simply isn't available. But, it should be (I don't mean tinker-toy methods either). Before CIDR, it was. The past few quarters has shown how necessary it is. Guys, this is a huge market gap, why isn't anyone filling it?
-- ROELAND M.J. MEYER Managing Director Morgan Hill Software Company, Inc. TEL: +001 925 373 3954 FAX: +001 925 373 9781 http://www.mhsc.com mailto: rmeyer@mhsc.com
-- --------------------------- Christopher A. Woodfield rekoil@semihuman.com PGP Public Key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xB887618B
There is a simple solution for redundancy - buy redundant T-1 lines, run BGP, route a large enough block of space to be globally routable. This is like complaining that you can only get a Yugo for $8K instead of a Porche. You want the Porche, pay the cash. You want to spend $50 a month for DSL, live with the limitations of the technology and the product offering. Providers can't afford to provide DSL for the current $$$, with the present services. T-1's are cheap these days, compared to a few years back. - Daniel Golding
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Christopher A. Woodfield Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2001 4:23 PM To: Roeland Meyer Cc: 'Steve Sobol'; Steve Schaefer; jmarr@twmaine.com; hunter@compuhelp.com; jpayne@sackheads.org; nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: The DSL business model
Not to mention that if you're looking to do BGP, most providers won't think of letting you run BGP over anything that's not at least a T1. When I was at Intermedia, we didn't even let customer do BGP over frame relay - they had to have a fractional T1 service at minimum.
-C
The technology that can be faulted, and I sincerely apologize for not being clear enough on this, is that which prevents adequate redundancy at the end-nodes. The fact that 100,000 businesses can get lopped off by a single provider business failure is pretty sad. I've tried, for over a year, to get redundant uplinks to an alternate provider (ISDN backup to xDSL). CIDR, prefix filtering, and cluelessness nail that effort every time. It doesn't seem to matter that I am more than willing to pay for it. It simply isn't available. But, it should be (I don't mean tinker-toy methods either). Before CIDR, it was. The past few quarters has shown how necessary it is. Guys, this is a huge market gap, why isn't anyone filling it?
-- ROELAND M.J. MEYER Managing Director Morgan Hill Software Company, Inc. TEL: +001 925 373 3954 FAX: +001 925 373 9781 http://www.mhsc.com mailto: rmeyer@mhsc.com
-- --------------------------- Christopher A. Woodfield rekoil@semihuman.com
PGP Public Key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xB887618B
On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 03:54:07PM -0400, Daniel Golding wrote:
There is a simple solution for redundancy - buy redundant T-1 lines, run BGP, route a large enough block of space to be globally routable. This is
Who's going to give a small business a large enough block to be globally routable?
Small business, so up to 500 employees? ip per user plus the IS/servers related to infrastructure, subnetting, you can easily justify some real address space. - jared On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 04:22:10PM -0400, Shawn McMahon wrote:
On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 03:54:07PM -0400, Daniel Golding wrote:
There is a simple solution for redundancy - buy redundant T-1 lines, run BGP, route a large enough block of space to be globally routable. This is
Who's going to give a small business a large enough block to be globally routable?
-- Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from jared@puck.nether.net clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.
On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 04:27:26PM -0400, Jared Mauch wrote:
Small business, so up to 500 employees?
ip per user plus the IS/servers related to infrastructure, subnetting, you can easily justify some real address space.
Should we start listing firms with hundreds of millions or more in market capitalization, that have less than 200 pieces of equipment with an IP address, but a significant business need for uninterrupted high speed data access to their corporate offices? Or will you just acccept that they exist, without needing to actually give you a tour of one?
On Mon, May 14, 2001 at 08:36:19PM -0700, Roeland Meyer wrote:
I disagree with this characterization. Quite a few of those businesses would gladly pay a few shekels more, for a decent SLA and some service.
And they can, today (assuming for a moment that SLA's are useful for accomplishing what you want, which is likely untrue).
I've tried, for over a year, to get redundant uplinks to an alternate provider (ISDN backup to xDSL). CIDR, prefix filtering, and cluelessness nail that effort every time. It doesn't seem to matter that I am more than willing to pay for it. It simply isn't available. But, it should be (I don't mean tinker-toy methods either).
You've been presented with countless options with varying degrees of effectiveness. If you choose not to implement them, that's your decision; just don't come whining to us the next time you suffer from irrecoverable business damage the next time your mission-critical DSL pipe goes down. There are forums for such off-topic discussion (inet-access and the isp-* lists come to mind), and NANOG is not one of them. If you're still lost, please refer to <http://www.nanog.org/endsystem.html>. Thanks! On Mon, May 14, 2001 at 11:49:46PM -0700, Roeland Meyer wrote:
Among other things, I'm also a SysAdmin. Of course, I have multiple personalities! But, Alex Black isn't one of them. Also note, Andreas Stoller's email addr. Do you actually think I would get any sort of response if I sent an email there?
It's fairly commonplace for providers to include _their_ e-mail and telephone contact information in SWIP data, rather than their downstream's. If they know what they're doing, they'll keep a log of such correspondences, and contact their customer as deemed necessary. This is hardly newsworthy. -adam
participants (6)
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Adam Rothschild -
Christopher A. Woodfield -
Daniel Golding -
Jared Mauch -
Roeland Meyer -
Shawn McMahon