Market for diversity

Sun Aug 26 20:26:03 UTC 2007

Jason LeBlanc wrote:
> 
> I agree with this, and many people take the Ts & Cs, MSA, etc the vendor 
> anyway.  We have a standing habit of reading over our new contracts with 
> our attorney on a con call, we always edit them, send them back to the 
> vendor and negotiate on any changes.  Its amazing how much you can get 
> things changed in your favor if you're persistent.
> 
> More on point for this thread, I always have new vendors bring in fiber 
> maps and show me their paths.  Images of the intended path specified on 
> the map are part of the contract, including verbage regarding failover 
> paths.  Once I know where their fiber is, I can look for another vendor 
> that takes a different path.  Some locations are easier than others of 
> course.  A lot depends on what the motto is as to where they like to run 
> fiber, or who they lease/bought their fiber from.
> What I find hard to combat are M&A changing operations over time, 
> overlooking contractual obligations on the vendor's part usually.  This 
> is a reason we always use 12 mo terms, we can change things fast enough 
> to beat their changing things for us.  Sometimes we even go back to the 
> same vendor, just to make sure the new company and contract detail what 
> we have and where it goes.  Sounds a little tedious, but at least you 
> know where your circuits go.

These are all business points. If you have enough bargaining power, you 
can get someone to agree to almost anything. If you are paranoid, that 
may even work for a while. If you seriously intend to renegotiate 
thousands of circuits involved in building global backbones every 12 
months... well, your budgets are going to start skewing in a very funny way.

Its very simple, if I have a simple network between my neighbor and me, 
I can ensure 100% diversity. 1 Wireless and 1 wired link at all times... 
as the distances increase, and the number of total nodes and paths 
increase (paths increase at something like (n-1)^2 or thereabouts), um, 
it gets exponentially more complex and more expensive to monitor.

On top of that, good/diverse/cheap right-of-ways DECREASE at probably 
close to a square root rate (especially over long distances). That is a 
fundamentally difficult problem as n gets very large.

Deepak