routing around Sprint's depeering damage

Sun Nov 2 14:32:35 UTC 2008

> > How about:  If there is a need, somebody will provide at a suitable
> price?
> >  If no body steps up, we don't need it.
> 
> There seems to be ample evidence, in many arenas, that naked
> capitalism can have disastrous results.

And there are lot of examples and ample evidence in history, in many areas,
that complete regulation, complete socialism can have disastrous results as
well. 

If you want to have a good idea on how the internet will look like in the US
after regulation, simply look at Australia. The government imposed
regulation early on in internet infrastructure market caused nothing but
raising the entry barrier for small ISPs, only creating government-approved
monopoly for major telcos/carriers.  Only such regulation creates a
situation where it is cheaper and affordable for a smaller ISP to route
traffic from .AU to .US, then back to .AU than interconnect directly with
incumbent carrier in their own country.  So yes, more regulations definitely
help the internet indeed (by adding extra 300ms into the process).

Instead of calling for socialist/communist policies to regulate the transit
industry, the single-homed networks can simply multihome.  Because of
Cogent, the cost of transit has come down to single-digit per megabit that
even after adding transport costs, it's now affordable to add a 2nd internet
connection for practically most organizations out there, especially in the
continental US (the same capitalism that you call 'disatrous results' is the
same capitalism that brought cheap dollars/meg pricing, allowing smaller
companies to multihome now when they couldn't afford to do so in the past).

As much as we blame Cogent and Sprint for breaking the internet, I also have
no sympathy for individual single-homed downstream customers on either
networks. If you are complaining about Sprint<->Cogent depeering and have
customers demanding for your mission-critical services, then you are just as
negligent to not have multihomed before all of this happened.  If you need
that 100% uptime guarantee, you shouldn't rely on single carrier, nor should
you rely on government for more regulation.  No one can help you but
yourself in ensuring your uptime-- so perhaps look at your own setup and
decide that you need that 2nd connection to back you up when first one
fails.  This is a simple business logic.

James