Peter Galbavy <peter@wonderland.org> writes:

Scenario (a) - Demon Internet install a trans-US DS3 backbone, all centred around New York, since this is where all our traffic flows throw. We have no US customers, so the network is wasted, and the DS3's get used as unidirectional pipes to the various NAPs. Anyone wanna share this network ?

In fact branching out in to the U.S. is probably an excellent idea for non-U.S. networks, particularly those with in Asia and Europe with adequate money to invest, ready access to trans-oceanic bandwidth, and subsidiaries or potential partners in the U.S. to handle operational and establishment issues. This is, after all, apparently what BT is doing, and they don't appear to be the only ones. Given the intuitive belief that market share is important to networks who want to be non-local in scope, and the geography of Europe compared to that of the U.S., particularly with the price of unlit or semilit fibre runs about to drop through the floor in some places, this makes perfect sense. Of course, as you half-indicate, this is very expensive for smaller organizations, however it often appears that consortia of smaller regional organizations remain fairly stable in Europe. A hierarchical approach given Europe's geography has some obvious distinct advantages over a centralized "global domination" approach, provided it can remain nimble and flexible enough to satisfy its components, offer good service and continue growing.

Guess which one I like ? But I will settle for (c). (Oh (d) for those who didn't guess).

If Europeans and Asians and Austrialians made strong efforts to keep the amount of traffic being sucked towards them from the U.S. with things like web caching hierarchies (haha, enjoy an international aspect to copyright legislation battles) and mirroring, particularly when this can be done without the total cooperation of end users, then they would be under less pressure to acquire more trans-Oceanic capacity from the U.S. Because culturally this would be much more difficult to accomplish in the U.S., Americans may well start clamouring for more bandwidth to satisfy them. Happy non-Americans, unhappy Americans, cash for increased bandwidth flows from American pockets. Alternatively, this would be great leverage for the kind of scheme you described as (a). Sean.