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Re: UUNET Pulling Peering Agreements

  • From: Kent W. England
  • Date: Fri May 02 11:35:41 1997

At 10:46 PM 01-05-97 -0400, Gordon Cook wrote:
>
>First it was AGIS (but who cares about AGIS?). Now UUNET. Tomorrow who?

Gordon;

In my view, UUNET and PSI were the second to try to put the Big Squeeze on,
with the CIX filtering incident with the original "settlements" squeeze
that ANS tried to perpetrate on the NSFNET regionals as the historic first.
The CIX filtering idea was that the smaller ISPs should be forced to pay a
$10k fee in the hope that they might be encouraged to buy transit instead.
Sprint forced the issue by welcoming the smaller ISP market while MCI
waffled, UUNET said "No way", and PSI said "It depends". Then along comes
Net99 and the backbone market blows wide open and now everyone resells
bandwidth. Not good for the big backbones.

When UUNET says "sure we'll peer with you, but we don't need no stinkin'
contract" and when MCI and others will sign a contract but only for a year,
what do you expect to happen someday? Pretty clever about the NDA -- it
kept the lid on for over a month.

Backbones are expensive, but hard to value to the customer. Bandwidth
resale leaves too much margin for small ISPs to make money, in the view of
the backbone providers. The market can't support thirty-five separate
backbones, even were they all to be "MFS-no-money-down" instant backbones,
as I sometimes think they are. :-)

Sooner or later, the Big Squeeze will work. If not now, then next year. If
your business plan competes head-to-head with a facilities-based ISP, then
you'd better think hard about how to change it, because there just aren't
going to be that many facilities-based ISPs in future.

--Kent

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