Re: ISPACs

"Justin W. Newton" <justin@erols.com> Thu, 05 December 1996 19:49 UTC

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Date: Thu, 05 Dec 1996 13:32:00 -0500
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From: "Justin W. Newton" <justin@erols.com>
Subject: Re: ISPACs
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At 10:44 AM 12/5/96 EST, John W. Stewart III wrote:

Tony says:
> > And they're dependent on you.  Can you cooperate?  Mebbe you personally
> > can't, but I'd like to think that there are many who could and would if
> > they saw the benefits.

I am very capable of cooperation if there is a large benefit, what I see in
your proposal, however, is a large risk with little benefit.  Maybe I am
missing something, but what do I, as a small ISP gain by doing this?  My
risks are farily apparent (at least some of them are).

1) I am dependant on competitors of mine of whom I may be somewhat unsure
as to their technical ability, and there is always the possibility that
they will act in an unscrupulous manner and /intentionally/ hose over my
announcements.  The only defense I have against this is strong legal
reprecussions for failure to properly handle routing announcements and
sharing of traffic.

2) If those strong legal terms /are/ in the contracts, I am suddenly open
to lawsuit from my competitors (one may substitute the word competitor with
peer if they so choose).  If a customer feels that I am providing
inadequate service they will likely choose to go to another ISP, which is
bad.  If a competitor feels that I am damaging their business through a
technical relationship that we have they are likely to take me to court.
Guess how expensive that can be?


>
>i'm not sure what i think of ISPACs yet, but relative to the
>above exchange, the internet of *today* already has inter-
>dependence between parties that don't pay each other.  imagine
>that i connect to ISP1, ISP1 and ISP2 peer, and My-Favorite-
>Web-Site connects to ISP2.  now imagine that ISP2 does
>something to permanently cut itself off from ISP1.  even
>though it's not ISP1's fault, i would consider changing
>providers (i.e., stop paying ISP1)

Right, but in this case you lose connectivity to ISP2's customers.  In the
situation that Tony is describing if one of /our competitors/ decides to
screw you, or simply doesn't have the technical ability on staff to make
things work, your connectivity to every site on the internet gets screwed
up.  
	As an engineer this is something that wouldn't be hard to make go, and if
the people who were involved in an ISPAC were of the caliber of skill as
the people commenting on this thread I wouldn't hesitate to join one.  The
problem comes from the fact that there simply aren't many people at small
ISP's (the under 10,000 user size), who are of that caliber, and many of
the people who are are being recruited constantly by larger companies.
Maybe there are people out there who want to put the fate of their company
into an unstable situation.  I am not one of those people.  I spend a large
portion of my time attempting to make certain that my network is /not/ fate
shared with other people, why would one willingly put themselves in a
position where they are sharing their connectivity fate with several
companies who's technical ability is an unknown, and who have a direct
interest in seeing me fail, and almost no gain by seeing me succeed.  


>
>i'll grant that today's inter-dependence doesn't involve
>shared address allocations, but the point is that providers'
>businesses already depend to some degree on other providers
>working, so it's not a *fundamental* change .. just a new
>detail
>
>/jws
>
>
>

Justin Newton
Network Architect
Erol's Internet Services