North American Network Operators Group

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Re: UUNET Press Release on Peering

  • From: Sean M. Doran
  • Date: Tue May 13 12:11:43 1997

Peter Galbavy <[email protected]> writes:

> Scenario (a) - Demon Internet install a trans-US DS3 backbone, all centred 
> around New York, since this is where all our traffic flows throw. We have 
> no US customers, so the network is wasted, and the DS3's get used as 
> unidirectional pipes to the various NAPs.
> Anyone wanna share this network ?

In fact branching out in to the U.S. is probably an
excellent idea for non-U.S. networks, particularly those
with in Asia and Europe with adequate money to invest,
ready access to trans-oceanic bandwidth, and subsidiaries
or potential partners in the U.S. to handle operational
and establishment issues.

This is, after all, apparently what BT is doing, and they
don't appear to be the only ones.

Given the intuitive belief that market share is important
to networks who want to be non-local in scope, and the
geography of Europe compared to that of the U.S.,
particularly with the price of unlit or semilit fibre runs
about to drop through the floor in some places, this makes
perfect sense.

Of course, as you half-indicate, this is very expensive
for smaller organizations, however it often appears that
consortia of smaller regional organizations remain fairly
stable in Europe.  A hierarchical approach given Europe's
geography has some obvious distinct advantages over a
centralized "global domination" approach, provided it can
remain nimble and flexible enough to satisfy its
components, offer good service and continue growing.

> Guess which one I like ? But I will settle for (c). (Oh (d) for those who 
> didn't guess).

If Europeans and Asians and Austrialians made strong
efforts to keep the amount of traffic being sucked towards
them from the U.S. with things like web caching
hierarchies (haha, enjoy an international aspect to
copyright legislation battles) and mirroring, particularly
when this can be done without the total cooperation of end
users, then they would be under less pressure to acquire
more trans-Oceanic capacity from the U.S.   Because
culturally this would be much more difficult to accomplish
in the U.S., Americans may well start clamouring for more
bandwidth to satisfy them.

Happy non-Americans, unhappy Americans, cash for increased
bandwidth flows from American pockets.  Alternatively,
this would be great leverage for the kind of scheme you
described as (a).

	Sean.
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