The questions stand

Wed May 20 21:35:43 UTC 1998

At 17:17 -0400 5/20/98, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>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.

No one is stopping you.  No one is stopping SAVVIS, either which is doing
similar work in the major metro areas.  Differences do exist of course.
Primarily the fact that you wouldn't be interconnecting such arrangements
located in different areas.

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

That has already happened in a number of rural areas and some metro areas
(Colorado Co-op?).  The problem traditionally has been getting small
competing providers to cooperate.

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

If you are telling me that MCI, et. al. won't sell you DS3 connections you
might have a point.  I doubt that is the case.

As for redundancy, five connections through a single physical location does
not constitute a redundant network.

Jim Browne                                                jbrowne at jbrowne.com
         "Lesson: PC's have a `keyboard lock' switch, and it works."
   - Kevin Brick, after RMA'ing a motherboard with a "bad keyboard connector"