Market for diversity (was: Re: Cogent latency / congestion)

Tue Aug 21 19:51:23 UTC 2007

> It's inevitable given buying throughput is rather like moving
> something by ship. You never go to the ship [fiber] owner; you
> go to a freight broker who deals with a consolidator who calls an
> agent who knows who has chartered ships from A to B on DATE and....

This may also have something to do with the fact that carriers/fiber 
owners tend to play a slight game of schizophrenia with themselves. On 
the same cables they try to make wildly different levels of compensation 
  (say: SONET voice traffic vs SONET data vs IP -- in decreasing order 
of value per bit)

Then try to increase the marginal value of existing assets by increasing 
the total bit capacity (when we all know the highest value traffic grows 
at the slowest rate).

So they sell of large chunks of capacity to brokers so they don't have 
to play channel wars (openly) with themselves.

Then do anticompetitive things when those brokers themselves try to move 
up the value chain by selling data PL services at IP prices, etc.

----

The telecom industry has not decided what the real value of its 
service(s) are. It knows what people will pay for a single connection 
and knows that its cost for failure to perform is only a fraction of 
what the engineering to "do it right" is. Simple economics.

Want to see a telecom industry that sells protected services and MEANS 
they are protected? Want to see a telecom industry that doesn't have 
people mucking around fat-fingering XCs anymore?

Try a 1 year SLA credit for service affecting outage on SONET services 
in your contract. If your carrier balks, offer to pay (additionally) 
whatever you think you'd pay for a truly protected service knowing 
you'll probably get the whole amount back if they don't provide it.

Deepak