Inter-provider relations

Fri Oct 25 14:40:46 UTC 1996

  Hello,

  Please take personal tirades and your vulgarities, originated or
  not, to private email.

  Thanks,

  Alan

> 
> At 03:25 PM 10/24/96 -0400, JDF wrote:
> >
> >	Interesting speech from Peter Kline at NANOG today...it seems that
> >AGIS's peering requirements are now so strict that AGIS today would not
> >peer with AGIS of only a few months ago.
> 
> Nope.  AGIS has been at the specified exchange points for well over a year,
> long before the trickle of peering requests turned into an ugly, swirling,
> threat-filled flood.  
> 
> >	Then there's Peter's comment to Ron Burleson, Cheif Operating
> >Officer of CAIS Internet (some of you know that CAIS had a very good
> >relationship with Net99, which continued for a while under AGIS.)  "Ron,
> >we're going to squish you like a bug."
> 
> 1.  The author of this mail was not present at the conversation, which took
> place when this guy Burleson, who I've never heard of, cornered me in the
> empty lunch room outside of the NANOG meeting room.
> 
> 2.  This mail makes it obvious that Burleson deliberately set out to make me
> say something which could be reported out of context in an attempt to make
> AGIS look bad.  It also explains why he made sure the room was empty.
>  
> 3.  The comment misquoted above is also horribly out of context.  Let's
> review the actual conversation:
> 
> RB:  Do you know who I am?
> 
> ME:  No.  Should I?  Have we met before?
> 
> RB:  I'm Ron Burleson, self important president of CGX Telecom [who?], which
> owns CAIS [oh.  I thought Cable and Wireless bought an interest in CAIS, but
> I guess I was wrong.].
> 
> ME:  OK.
> 
> RB:  You didn't [blah blah blah tirade tuned out about CAIS and AGIS].
> 
> ME:  OK.
> 
> RB:  Why don't you return my phone calls or answer my mail?
> 
> ME:  For some time now I have received much more mail and many more phone
> calls than I can personally answer.
> 
> RB:  I'm going to fuck the AGIS network any way I can.
> 
> ME:  So, you're going to fuck the AGIS network... 
> 
> 
> Here I paused to consider my responses, which could have included:
> 
> - Thank you.
> - Thank you very much.
> - Fuck you.
> - Fuck you very much.
> - I'd fuck your network back, but I don't want to catch whatever's given you
> those running sores.
> - Fuck your network and the horse it rode in on.
> - about a million other vulgar things I could think of.
> 
> but instead, I said:
> 
>   "Then I'll squash you like a bug," which seemed to me to be a
> proportionate, non-vulgar, measured, I'm-the-bigger-person response to a
> pretty off-the-graph, vulgar, and irresponsible tirade.
> 
> >	Peter is doing wonders for inter-provider relations.  What do
> >y'all say that the rest of us follow the older, more friendly model,
> >instead of trying to kill each other?
> 
> I didn't start it, and I'm not the one who made the threat.  It is big Ron
> who apparently wants to kill me/AGIS.  And I just don't stand around and
> take crap from people.
> 
> >	Sure, a lot of us are in competition.  From today's speech, it
> >seems that AGIS is is more competition than the rest of us.
> 
> Competition is either good or bad, pick one.  Based on the grip CAIS has on
> the DC market, I'd guess CAIS was founded based on the idea that competition
> is good.  My relationship with Bob Gibson has always been cordial.
> 
> >	But personally, if I were a small or mid-size provider, I'd rather
> >buy service from somebody that I've seen to be in /friendly/ competition
> >with their peers -- that way, once I got big enough to strike out on my
> >own, I could stay friendly with my old provider on a peer instead of a
> >customer level.  This was the intention with the Net99 deal, back when
> >Net99 was known as "the backbone that doesn't suck."
> 
> It sucked pretty bad in the end.  Joe didn't give Dave any of the tools
> needed to run a decent network, and I think Dave did an amazing job with
> what he had.
> 
> >	Back to the point -- like it or not, we all rely on each other and
> >each others' networks to make the Internet happen.
> >	We can follow the AGIS model and cut each others' throats until we
> >really are just a bunch of autonomous systems with the occasional path
> >between, or we can interconnect -- network, to use a more laoded term. 
> 
> AGIS has cordial relationships with other majors like ANS, NETCOM, Sprint,
> MCI, and uu.net, as well as many others.  
> 
> >	I think we should be a network. 
> >
> >	(Please note that while I am speaking only for myself, CAIS's
> >business plan is more on the friendly side.) 
> 
> Then get an email account at AOL.  I consider you to be speaking for CAIS.
> 
> 
> There's a very serious issue here for CAIS, which is that a man purporting
> to be its president/owner/whatever acted quite irresponsibly.  The way to
> get even with AGIS, if that's what he needs to do, is to build a bigger
> better network and win over our customers, not 'fuck' the AGIS network, with
> all the consequences that suggested action implies for our customers.
> 
> In light of Ron's comment to me, I think it would be in the best interest of
> AGIS's customers to email or call Mr. Ron Burleson of CAIS/CGX (email
> address conveniently cc'd above by JDF) and ask him how he intends to fuck
> AGIS (by SYN flooding or other denial of service attack, physically damaging
> colocates, or what).  When he doesn't respond, bury his office with calls
> and mail, or even better, track him down at IETF or the next NANOG, get him
> into a corner, and demand to know why he didn't return your calls and mail.  
> 
> Peter
> 
> 

-- 
Alan Hannan
Not Employed Networking, Ltd.
email: alan at mindvision.com.
phone: 402/488-0238