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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Provider credibility - does it matter? was Re: Inter-provider relations
On Fri, 25 Oct 1996, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
> Not at all necessarily correct. We are a UK backbone provider. We carry
> much of our traffic 6000 miles to California over very expensive Atlantic
> circuits, where we pass it off to American providers, who use very cheap
> and much shorter US links. We ship about 5% more traffic to the USA than
> we get back. So on balance we are subsidizing the US Internet:
>
> * we pay more to carry the packets
> * we give more than we receive
>
> Before you go making statements like that, please answer the following
> questions:
>
> 1) How many US ISP's customers would notice if vbc.net fell off the
> net?
>
> 2) How many of vbc.net's customers would notice if the USA fell off
> the net?
There is a name for this ridiculous style of argument, but I don't
remember it ...
Let's recast the questions:
1. How many UK ISPs would notice if seastrom.com fell off the Net?
2. How many of seastrom's customers would notice if Europe fell off
the Net?
Your questions don't address the issues at all. They may make you
feel better.
A large part of our Atlantic traffic (most, I believe) is US users
accessing our customers' (eg the BBC, you may have heard of them) or
our customers' customers' Web sites (eg www.bullfrog.co.uk). As I
said, US networks pay pennies to carry traffic to us, and we pay at
least ten times as much to carry the packets across the Atlantic. We
carry our packets, and we carry packets for US networks. We pay at
least 90% of the carrying costs.
Europe heavily subsidizes the US Internet. It's not just VBCnet: the
European Internet community pays something like 90% of the costs of
traffic between Europe and North America. The same applies to the
rest of the world.
If you paid attention to the discussion at hand, you might notice
that I was criticizing the Economist's model of the Internet. One
of the things wrong with that model was their failure to notice the
huge subsidy that the rest of the world pays to the US Internet.
There are a lot of other things wrong with the model. Poor models
make for poor reasoning, just like talking without listening makes
for a poor dialog.
--
Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015
http://www.uk.vbc.net VBCnet West +1 408 971 2682 fax +1 408 971 2684
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