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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: AOL & Cogent
On Sun, Dec 29, 2002 at 09:12:16PM +0000, Paul Vixie wrote: > per-bit revenue for "high tier" network owners would turn into per-port > revenue for exchange point operators. where's the market in that? how I think you just answered your own question. Exchange point operations. > could a "high tier" even exist in those conditions? I think its a difficult market to exist in anyway. It may be that networks can make revenue on characteristics of their network other than simply bps. The quality (read: latency, loss factor, transparency/or-not, connectedness) and services (read: various types of servers such as for games, voice/multimedia gateways, storage, flexibility - perhaps deliver service further than the smartjack?) may be what differeniates one from another. This doesn't seem to be happening though and I'm not sure how likely it will be. If the market is soley about the number of bits, soon this might not be an attractive market for a lot of providers to be in. If there are a lot of suppliers and the ease of changing suppliers is simple (good reason for you to want to get rid of NAT :-), the market will be commoditized with consumers simply moving their connections around to Cogent-like providers on a month-to-month basis. This assumes most suppliers provide a reasonable level of quality, which most probably do. If there are only a few suppliers (oligopoly?), little choice and strong barriers to entry, it might be a much more attractive market to be in. As a customer, I'd like to see the former more than the latter. Perhaps then the services above would be more forthcoming? John
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