John, Could you elaborate on your technical criteria for this? For instance is it 10Mbps - 45Mbps pipe access? 4Mbps spikes? what? Are these commercial or academic organizations? Marty PS: I note that your NSFNet T3 has a 10Mbps ethernet interface as of 2 weeks ago, do things change if/when it goes to FDDI? --------

From: Martin Lee Schoffstall <schoff@psi.com> Subject: Re: The CIX and the NSFNET regionals - a dilemma Date: Tue, 04 Feb 92 22:47:42 -0500

I've deferred responding publicly to the com-priv message since I hoped others would. But I will respond to this....

there isn't a routing "problem". there are gigapackets/month running through the CIX reliably, with little latency, and very inexpensively.

What vaf wants is some tuning for the high bandwidth path that he and a very few others have by the grace of nsf and tax $'s. it is a reasonable request given that people don't want to ante up quite yet for t3 cix interconnects. This tuning to my knowledge is driven by a fairly small % of the total CIX networks (10 out of 500?).

I am providing the following data based on NEARnet's current membership in order to put the situation in perspective. I would expect that the ratios would vary significantly from one network service provider to another. Of NEARnet's 115 members, we would require such "tuning" (as mentioned above) for at least 20 organizations. This represents 60-70 network routes out of about 250. This considers only bandwidth; certainly reliability and latency might also force transit network selection. The routing issue is very real for any network which serves the academic and research community. Providing for their needs, while preventing the Internet from segmenting, is the significant challenge before us. /John