North American Network Operators Group

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Re: links on the blink (fwd)

  • From: Mike O'Dell
  • Date: Sat Nov 04 23:04:36 1995

"take the contracts away from MFS...."

uh, the last I knew there was no "contract" that MFS has from anyone
(the gubmint types??) that can be taken away.  I haven't taken the time
to sort out who pays for what at the other NAPs.

The Gigaswitch at MAE-EAST is smoking along just fine. 
There *are* ports onto MAE-EAST with lower-performance than dedicated
Gigaswitch ports, but that is a function of what some clients want to
buy.  To a good first approximation, MFS sells what the clients want.
Same with MAE-WEST as well.  That is why some attachees have a port on
a shared Ethernet off the FDDI and others have (possibly multiple)
dediated FDDI ports on the Gigaswitch.

Remember that MAE-EAST existed over a year before NAPs were created.

As for additional exchange points, this is trivially obvious and
will almost certainly come to pass in some time frame, I hope sooner
rather than later.

What is less obvious is who runs them, especially if one has second
thoughts about the majority of the exchanges not be run by one
company, as well as insist they be implemented with non-experimental
technology and operated by people with clues about telco-grade service
quality.  It would also be nice if the exchange operator were not
a competitor of the subscribers, but all of these desires may
over-constrain the problem.

One would think there is a nice little business in running exchange
points around the country.  Get co-lo space on a contract that will
let you sub-let, put in a nice FDDI Gigaswitch, heavy-duty power
with generator backup, good remote hands, plenty of DS3 entrance
facilities (ideally on OC12 or faster sonet for growth!), monitoring
and statistics gathering facilities, out-of-band management network,
and a nice NOC somewhere to coordinate with all your customers.

Put locations in major metro areas and go to town.  You may need
some up-front cash, but hey, this Internet thing is hot, so you
can probably find investors (big grin).

So how much do you have to charge subscribers to make this work?

	-mo