More BW, Less Taxes

Tue May 29 16:22:34 UTC 2001

Simon Lockhart <simonl at rd.bbc.co.uk>

| In Europe [bandwith is] becoming cheaper too - especially to major cities.

You're welcome.

	Sean.
- -- 
aka Sean Doran <smd at ebone.net>

PS - The "gigantic plunge" in pricing was triggered by Dave Morton, who,
     acting with what was then Ebone, negotiated a city-to-city PDH E3
for approximately 10% of the prices on offer from the PTTs. This particular
circuit set a benchmark that terrorized the industry in advance of further
trans-border deregulation (wisely) promoted by the Commission of the
European Union.  Previous efforts led by Peter Lothberg, Dave, 
Stefan Westman and many other former Ebone board and consortium
members led to dramatic discounts against PTT 1/2-circuit pricing,
and of course, companies like Hermes Europe Railtel (now part of Ebone)
also stepped into the market with deep discounts against the traditional
telco models of international/intercity pricing.

This does not exactly help the North Americans, but to make it NANOG-relevant,
there are certainly some things that the NA regulators and consumers of
bandwidth can learn from Europe, just as Europeans have learned from
successes and failures in earlier large-IP-backbone construction in NA.  
First and foremost is that "creative destruction" works very well at
reducing prices in practise, and incrementalism does not.   Service 
performance itself remains essentially unchanged either way.
QoS therefore is a solution to a non-problem (maintaining service levels),
and is moreover a contributor to incrementalist thinking.