MAE-West is up again ( RA Contract Value )

Fri Jun 7 04:47:37 UTC 1996

>		Please reread the solicitation again carfully.
>		I am not aware of any language that indicates
>		MAE-WEST, housed at NASA-AMES or MFS-SanJose
>		was part of the agreement.  These systems were
>		put there out of the good graces of ISI and MERIT.
>		No-one was paying for them or thier on-going operations.
>		When folks wanted to peer, they were explicitly told
>		these were not production machines.  Something that
>		the RA team did on the side, with spare cycles,
>		BECAUSE it was/is important.
>
>		Now, lets look a bit more into that high dollar
>		award, shall we?  Reread that soliciation again.
>		No where does it state that the RA gets a free ride
>		at any of the NAPS.  We have to pay, just like everyone
>		else.  And we have two connections, where most everyone
>		else has one. And who is the RA paying, with our award
>		dollars?  Your right! Its your local telco/NAP operator.
>		Just as a datapoint, one of them had set inital pricing
>		at $60,000.00 per MONTH per connection. They have been
>		talked down from that number, but it still would eat
>		that paltry 10M award in much less than 5 years.

The more intersesting question to me, would be one of
what is the cost per user of the RA, and is a NAP/MAE
with an RA a better serviec than one without.  Two easy
models for paying for RA services at MAEs/NAPs, are for
the NAP/MAE operator pay for the RA service and fund that
from interconnect fees.  The other way, would be for the
RA to collect fees from users, but then the RA would
have to do collections, etc, and do a risk assumption
which they aren't really in the position to do, like the
commerical NAP/MAE operators are.

I seem to remember this thing about wanting to move to
a commerical based net from a government funded one.

Of course having a RA service paid for by the users
(directly or indirectly), would quickly give people
some data points for the value of the service.

I don't have my numbers handy, but average pricing for
NAP/MAP varies between $5000-$10,000 for a >50mbps <200mbps
connection.  (Having just completed this in the past
two days..)

-- 
Jeremy Porter, Freeside Communications, Inc.      jerry at fc.net
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