[NIC-960209.1757] Routing Problem (fwd)
Michael Dillon
michael at memra.com
Wed Feb 14 03:11:14 UTC 1996
On Tue, 13 Feb 1996, Jonathan Heiliger wrote:
> Wow, so we just do this in a few hundred places and you've lowered the
> overall routing table by 8 * N(hundred). The main problem, as we all
> know, is this isn't a stable marketplace. Not only is there fierce
> competition for staff, but also for customers. Why would a number of
> small providers want join together?
Well actually, there isn't a fierce competition for customers and I
somehow doubt that there is much competition for staff. The market is
growing by leaps and bounds. The value of the Internet exists only
because service providers work co-operatively and exchange traffic with
each other. In just about every market there are STILL new startup ISP's
who are succeeding. Yes, there are failures, but the failure rate is very
low and it's only the most incompetent fools or incredibly unlucky ISP's
who are having problems.
There are definitely advantages for a lot of small ISP's banding together
by buying access through a 3rd-party exchange point. One is that they now
gain the benefit of the exchange point's technical staff. The small ISP
needn't learn all the details about BGP peering because the exchange
point does it for him. And when the exchange point technical people can
help out the small ISP's (their customers) with technical problems that
are beyond the ability of the small ISP's own staff.
There is a limit to the size an ISP can grow to and still provide
top-notch quality service. In every market I am aware of, ISP's who focus
on quality service are reaping the rewards in spite of often higher
prices than their competition. Therefore I believe that the market
naturally has room for many small ISP's and will continue to do so. The
"exchange point" concept also provides opportunities for the more
technically sophisticated ISP's who are tired of handholding dialup
customers. Many new dialup customers have NEVER USED A COMPUTER BEFORE!
Anyway, such an ISP can drop or de-emphasize their dialup services and
become an exchange point by focussing on providing leased-line services
to other ISP's.
How is this relevant? Well, if you want to encourage greater aggregation
in the global Internet, one way to do so is to explain to ISP's how a
more structured Internet can be of benefit to them by allowing them to
focus on a market niche and become real good at that rather than try to
be a jack-of-all-trades ISP who hasn't time to do any one thing very
well. This kind of structure may make it easier to get knowledge about
renumbering filtered down to the masses or it may indeed make renumbering
less urgent.
Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael at memra.com
More information about the NANOG
mailing list