The questions stand

Wed May 20 21:17:26 UTC 1998

On Wed, May 20, 1998 at 05:17:17PM -0400, Brian Horvitz wrote:
> > If they could be happy selling OC3 and 12's to local exchanges, and let
> > _them_ sell the damned connectivity at "ISP retail", all the local
> > traffic would stay _local_, and I strongly suspect that the rest of the
> > big exchanges might start _working_.
> 
> That means I'm buying second tier bandwidth from a local exchange... or in
> essence just another ISP who sells only to other ISPs.  The upstream
> portion doesn't seem to matter unless all the local ISPs use that exchange
> exclusively.

I do so wish we could get over the "tier" fixation.

If I start the Tampa Bay Internet Exchange, let's say, and I haul in
OC-3 links from the 5 top backbones, and DS-3's to the 4 NAP's, I can
then (very likely) a) resell bandwidth to local ISP's for quite a bit less
than the backbones could sell them a local drop, which would b) be
quintuply redundant in cast of feed failure, and c) unload all the
cross provider traffic from the NAP's, and indeed, the backbone itself.

This worked perfectly well with Usenet topology, until the commercial
wonks started screwing it up.

In fact, I could operate the exchange as a co-op, _owned_ by all the
local providers. 

Except for the back bone operators, who's best interests is such a
scheme _not_ it?

(And please note here: just because I _could_ oversubscribe the uplinks
doesn't meant I _have_ to.)

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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