Selfish routing

Mon Apr 28 12:07:58 UTC 2003

> Your arguments are as repetitive as they are incoherent.  Your position,
> distilled, is that everyone will go bankrupt if they listen to their
> vendors, and instead should spend money like crazy to build excess capacity
> into their network which they wouldn't need with traffic engineering.

If the vendor is sitting on a opposite side of the negotiating table, the
goal of vendor is fundamentally different from your goal. The sales people
of the vendors are paid based on comissions. This means that they are
interested in selling you $40 lightbulbs. That is waht makes companies spend
money like crazy.

> Lighting up dark fiber between pops is not as cheap, fast, or simple as you
> pretend it is, nor is it necessarily less expensive than purchasing
> circuits.

Lighting fiber between pops is fast, easy and cheap. It is clearly cheaper
than paying for OC-48 circuits.

> I've witnessed the implosion of many large ISPs and CLECs, and
> all failed due to incredibly stupid business plans and/or mismanagement --
> not technical or engineering decisions.

What those ISPs and ILECs did was buy tons of equipment and tons of
circuits, lit up DS3s in addition to OC-12s for the backbone and hired too
many people who told them that it is difficult to run networks well. Thanks
to those ISPs now one can get a $3M lot of M40 and M160 for $750k cash.

> This includes all those Cisco Funded Networks that provide us so much
> amusement.

And somehow engineers are still buying into a magic box solution?

> Your personal anti-vendor crusade is adding much more heat than light to
> this thread.  There are many technical approaches which may be valid
> depending on business factors; to claim any approach but yours is financial
> suicide is incredibly naive, not to mention provably wrong.

I do not have anti-vendor crusade. I have a crusade against vendors who are
selling ice to the eskimo, while molding the concept of what ice is to fit
their whitepapers.

Alex