North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Trans-Atlantic Traffic

  • From: Per Gregers Bilse
  • Date: Thu Aug 21 18:25:54 1997

On Aug 21, 15:49, "Sean M. Doran" <[email protected]> wrote:
> This largely works in part because of the origins of Ebone
> and the people who have worked with it since then, and
> because Ebone focuses principally on large ISPs.  That
> leads to the assumption that customers aggregate enough
> traffic that they will use all the capacity they pay for
> at all times, which also leads to Ebone's no-overbooking
> design, and consequently to Ebone's rather large
> cost-based prices relative to its competitors which target
> vastly different markets, or do massive loss-leading, or
> do massive cross-subsidy, or all three.
> 
> One way of looking at the Ebone backbone is as a large TDM
> network, much as one could build with ATM and CBR VCs,
> only without the drawbacks of ATM or a big VC mesh (and
> with the drawbacks of a complicated router-based network).
> 
> There are of course several other pan-European providers
> such as Unisource's UBN, BT's CIP, UUNET, EUNET,
> Compuserve, Global -1, and IBM Advantis, each of which
> appears to function much like their counterparts or
> analogues in the U.S.A.  This, however, is not exactly
> "line sharing" per se.

You need to study some more (European) Internet history.  Among
other things, you seem to overlook that the EUnet you know today, as
well as our infrastructure (in many ways similar to Ebone's), was a
result of political manouvering leading to us being kicked out of
Ebone at the time (6-7 years ago).  Then the really interesting hard
work started, building from the ground while Ebone had its US half
circuits paid by the NSF, and Rick Adams lent us a big helping hand
during those years.  (There is still much confusion caused by the
similar names of the two companies, but that's a different story.)

As you are probably aware, we have been on very friendly terms with
Ebone for several years now.

-- 
------ ___                        --- Per G. Bilse, Director Network Eng & Ops
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