Mailing List Archive

On Thu, 15 Feb 1996, Michael Dillon wrote:

> Wrong. It already is happening in some regions. You won't see any direct
> competition in the Internet business for at least two more years unless
> you see monsters under your bed and the CIA are listening in on your
> brain.
>
> The Internet market is miniscule. It is growing fast. It will continue to
> grow fast. No one company can hope to grow fast enough to dominate in any
> particular city. That's why you don't have to work with your local
> competition, you just have to work with your other local ISP's in
> building your local Internet infrastructure and growing your local
> Internet market..

Yes, so why not take you address space from you upstreem provider and
yes, when you need to change it. We started with 1 /24 then, /23 then
/19, all from Sprintlink. We then added a MCI connection and the Internic
gave us a /18, then we got connected to a NAP, the NIC gave us one more
/18. Yes, we had to renumber off the /24, /23, and are still working on
the /19.

The point is that the NIC has no idea how long you will be in business,
or if you need the space at all. I am provding access to right now 10
ISP, that will be gone in a year, and have watch that many die so far.

Nathan Stratton CEO, NetRail, Inc. Your Gateway to the World!
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Email sales@netrail.net Arlington, Va. 22201
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>Yes, so why not take you address space from you upstreem provider and
>yes, when you need to change it. We started with 1 /24 then, /23 then
>/19, all from Sprintlink. We then added a MCI connection and the Internic
>gave us a /18, then we got connected to a NAP, the NIC gave us one more
>/18. Yes, we had to renumber off the /24, /23, and are still working on
>the /19.
>
>The point is that the NIC has no idea how long you will be in business,
>or if you need the space at all. I am provding access to right now 10
>ISP, that will be gone in a year, and have watch that many die so far.

Obviously you don't know the right people. While some startup ISP's
get a /19. Other startup ISP's with no customers get a /14. And why
renumber if you can get IANA to align an entire /8 before you even
have customers?

Perhaps there are some unpublished criteria being used to distinguished
between these ISP's market projections. The published criteria don't
seem to be sufficient to explain these dispararities. Since these
allocations happened before these startup ISP companies had any customers,
I don't understand what method for evaluating "effective utilization"
would lead to these companies getting such large allocations. Other than
relying on rosy engineering diagrams and optimistic market studies.

The phase of the moon seems to be as good an explaination as any.

The backing of a large cable or bell operating company isn't a good
predictor of success. Yet these type of companies seem to be getting
larger than average allocations for their ISP businesses before having
any customers. Whatever happened to all those set-top boxes for
interactive television?
--
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
Affiliation given for identification not representation

> > Creating a consortium [akin to the NAP model] of small ISP's could
> > easily resolve this problem, if all address space allocated to each
> > ISP was contiguous and could be aggregated to a larger prefix.
>
> But, this would require working with your direct competition in your
> local geographic area.
>
> Ain't gonna happen.
>
> No way, No How.

Why not? We already have competing TV stations sharing an antenna site, and
competing newspapers sharing a printing press and distribution mechanism.
I don't see why ISPs couldn't do something similar where it's in everybody's
interest.

-- Walt

> > > But, this would require working with your direct competition in your
> > > local geographic area.
> > >
> > > Ain't gonna happen.
> > >
> > > No way, No How.
> >
> > Why not? We already have competing TV stations sharing an antenna site, and
> > competing newspapers sharing a printing press and distribution mechanism.
> > I don't see why ISPs couldn't do something similar where it's in everybody's
> > interest.
>
> Newspapers and TV stations are content providers, only a few ISPs are content
> providers. ISPs are more "packet movers" than anything else, so it comes down
> to who can move packets the best, not who has more appealing packets. And this
> boils down to technical competance. I can only see "Internet Content" providers
> banding together.

That and the fact that ISP owners seem to have larger ego's to protect, for
some reason. You can no longer claim "I have more bandwidth than you do."
It's a pity, really. It prevents local traffic exchanges from being as
popular as they might, as well.

Dave

--
Dave Siegel Sr. Network Engineer, RTD Systems & Networking
(520)623-9663 Network Consultant -- Regional/National NSPs
dsiegel@rtd.com User Tracking & Acctg -- "Written by an ISP,
http://www.rtd.com/~dsiegel/ for an ISP."

Dave Siegel wrote:
>That and the fact that ISP owners seem to have larger ego's to protect, for
>some reason. You can no longer claim "I have more bandwidth than you do."
>It's a pity, really.

A year ago we suggested local T-1 connected ISPs pool a T-3.
(it would have worked out to same cost for shared 10Mbps to a
45Mbps pipe as we all paid for a DS1).

We got back exactly 0 Yes-responses. Dave, you were one of those
zero respondents.

This isn't a "why can't we all get along" topic. ISPs are being
formed by inexperienced entrepeneurs who think competition is much
better than cooperation (Prisoner's Dilemma.)

Perhaps in a year or two, when all the struggling ailing
decay-ridden ISPs are gone, and the healthy ones remain,
then cooperation will be more of the de rigeur.

Note: Someone told me today about an article in ??? that
pointed out in 1993 there were 300 ISPs, in 1995 1500
ISPs, and that number is expected to drop to 300 by end 1997.


Ehud

p.s. If AT&T and MCI can team up to compete in the LEC market,
I don't see why ISPs can't team up to get bandwidth, peerage,
routing, etc. It's not ego's[sic], it's immaturity.


--
Ehud Gavron (EG76)
gavron@Hearts.ACES.COM
: Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail will cost $500/message under USC 47 s 5.5.2 :
: which can be found online at http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/47/ :

> p.s. If AT&T and MCI can team up to compete in the LEC market,
> I don't see why ISPs can't team up to get bandwidth, peerage,
> routing, etc. It's not ego's[sic], it's immaturity.

(scene: paul's office. paul is busily looking through his huge pile of
hats, complaining that there are too many and that most don't fit well.)

(finally, wearing a hat emblazoned "CIX", he rises, looks at camera, and
says...)

check out http://www.cix.org/ if you're looking for other ISP's to team up
with.