Cooperation between SMALL ISPs (not the way I want it to be)

Thu Feb 15 22:36:42 UTC 1996

On Thu, 15 Feb 1996, Alan B. Clegg wrote:

> On Thu, 15 Feb 1996, Michael Dillon wrote:
> 
> > The Internet market is miniscule. It is growing fast. It will continue to 
> > grow fast. No one company can hope to grow fast enough to dominate in any 
> > particular city. That's why you don't have to work with your local 
> > competition, you just have to work with your other local ISP's in 
> > building your local Internet infrastructure and growing your local 
> > Internet market..
> 
> I know that and you know that, but the people that are forming the small
> startup ISPs that are NOT ON THIS LIST (and don't even know about this
> list) don't know that, and don't care.

Lucky for you then! You can be the one in your area to start up a 
regional provider to service small ISP's and get away from the headaches 
of having to service dialup customers yourself. The ISP's will end up 
getting allocated addresses from your larger block and thus they will end 
up co-operating even though they don't know it. You can multihome your 
own network to 3 of the big NSP's, provide POP's in two different areas 
of the city so that small ISP's can connect to both your POP's and avoid 
the "backhoe" syndrome, and you can make a good living too.

> As I have stated in other mail, I'm just playing devil's advocate and
> looking at the position of smaller ISPs that see the 'big boys' taking
> away all the users. 

Now that you are starting an aggregating business, it is in your personal 
financial interest to explain to these smaller ISP's how the market is 
growing and there will be plenty of users for them. Help them grow their 
businesses because it helps you grow yours. Teach them how to market 
based upon service and not upon penis size (oops, I meant # of T1's).

> I would be happy to get every new ISP in a region to work together to make
> a better world for us all, but too many of them are worried more about the
> $$$ bottom line than the 'good of the net', and the way they build their
> $$$ bottom line is to get the most clients while the ISP across the street
> goes belly up. 

The only problem with this scenario is that no matter what the 
moneygrubbing ISP does, it will *NOT* make the guy across the street go 
belly up. I have come across many situations where ISP's have gone 
belly-up over the past two years and it was always due to mismanagement 
and/or inability to provide a quality service. In Seattle, Atlanta, 
Toronto and my hoemtown in Vernon, BC, Canada it was always the same story.

> I guess you could push the idea that once you manage to kill the fellow
> across the street's business, you get all that address space to yourself,
> but I still don't think that REAL cooperation in the small ISP marketplace
> is a reality. 

Well, it *IS* a reality in many cities already.

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

Cooperation between *SMALL* ISPs (not the way I want it to be)

Cooperation between SMALL ISPs (not the way I want it to be)