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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations
Sean Donelan writes: > Ah, a reason why Sprint's filters are self-defeating. You would > be better off leaving sprint now, and going to a different provider. Sean, Were it not for Sprint, I wouldn't exist. When I was starting out I had never even seen a cisco (although I'd been shoving tcp/ip through them for a dozen years). I had no idea where to buy one or how to configure it. Sprint not only told me what I needed, they sold it to me at a good price. They configured it for me. My first lesson in cisco configuration was by telephone at 4 am one morning from a Sprint engineer, while we waited for techs to do something with my line. (I had one of the oddest set of qualifications and non-qualifications around. I had co-founded the GE corporate tcp/ip network in 1983, but I was in R&D, and we'd handed that off to MIS. I had run a LAN segment of 30 or so assorted unix boxes for a dozen years, but I'd never configured a router more complicated than a Sun with two enet ports. I was an applications type - distributed OS's and the like.) When I was a 56k site with 8 dialup lines in my home, and some people were trying to extract $10K/yr to pay for a CIX router that almost none of my packets ever came near, Sprint stood with me and the other tiny providers. (Selling dialup was then a side business generating less than $10K gross revenue the first year.) Thanks in part to Sprint, that side business has grown into a network of four POPs bringing the Internet to NY State's Adirondack region. There's no fortune to be made here, but there's a living in it. It's what I wanted to do, and I couldn't have done it without Sprint. Sean Doran's recent posting about how the Sprints aren't out to squash us little guys but in fact are dependent on us was remarkably like the way I used to explain Sprint's position during the CIX filtering war in summer of '94. In fact, I think he stole those ideas from me :) Sprint is big, and they're busy, and it can be damnably hard to get their attention (hence my posting), but I'm here because they helped me when I needed help and backed me politically and operationally when I needed backing. Out here in the woods, things like that still matter. I think there are other solutions to my problem. I personally don't even want to multihome ... my private line to Sprint has never gone down, so I'm effectively part of Sprint's network, and last time I checked, Sprint was multi-homed. My colocated customer is sitting on Sprint's network ... what more can they want? Me practicing BGP on them? Unfortunately, *their* major customer had its weekend trade show a week ago when a big fiber cut isolated the show from my customer's server all day. Since the company had gone public the Thursday before and had bet its farm (and a lot of other peoples') on good press from the trade show, things were kind of tense, and my customer is in no mood to be told how they're already multi-homed. -- Dick St.Peters, Gatekeeper, Pearly Gateway, Ballston Spa, NY [email protected] Owner/operator, NetHeaven 518-885-1295/1-800-910-6671 Internet for Albany/Saratoga, Glens Falls, North Creek, & Lake Placid Visit the Internet Conference Calendar http://calendar.com/conferences
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