The thing that needs to be understood is that if we as an industry don't fix this problem, the government will fix it for us. The government won't care if there is a distinction between a "Big" or "Small" guy amongst ISP's anymore than they will between SBC or BellSouth and some Mom&Pop local Telco. I think that this attitude is -precisely- what the legislators will decide to fix. $.02 Derek Elder US Web / Gray Peak Technologies Network Engineering 212-548-7468 Pager - 888-232-5028 delder@graypeak.com http://www.usweb.com A Strategic Partner for the Information Age. -----Original Message----- From: Hui-Hui Hu [mailto:hhui@arcfour.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 1998 12:44 AM To: delder@graypeak.com Subject: Re: NOC communications OK, but large providers don't want to talk to small providers. It's a stated policy of many networks to refer a smaller customer/provider to their upstream. I only want to talk to someone who's competent (I get really sick of kids who have just discovered traceroute and send me e-mail, or worse yet call me, because they don't understand what "administratively denied" means) . My point is only that there is always a pecking order and by making network ops egalitarian you end up with a high signal/noise ratio, or worse yet, all the people who actually are relevant leave. (Witness NANOG: half the people from MCI etc. don't read any more) I don't have a solution, unfortunately. Sigh. -h : Shouldn't be that hard to verify that someone is actually a network : provider. Criteria is, run a public network, you qualify. Pretty simple.