[132792] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Level 3 Communications Issues Statement Concerning
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Derek J. Balling)
Wed Dec 1 15:38:50 2010
From: "Derek J. Balling" <dredd@megacity.org>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinFteLop+sswH4vjPdxkag6+AAsscy6Ky-ZoHzL@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 15:38:41 -0500
To: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Nov 29, 2010, at 10:25 PM, William Herrin wrote:
> There are a couple forms of shared billing.
There's a third kind you failed to mention that doesn't require equal =
footing of the parties. The broker.
I might pay an apartment broker $X to help find me an apartment. In turn =
the apartment broker might match me up with an apartment, and charge the =
landlord $Y for a successful tenancy.
$Y is frequently much higher than $X, because the value to the landlord =
is much higher than the value to the tenant.
There's a lot of similarities to the ISP model here. It's not worth =
"beaucoup cash" to the end-user to pay for all the overhead of the =
bandwidth costs. Their whole "benefit" is getting to watch a movie. =
Netflix and L3, on the other hand, stand to make quite a bit of money on =
the transaction, and could pay the "broker-ISP" a heftier sum to handle =
all their transactions with their end-users for them.
They do that because it's not cost-effective for them to try and do =
direct transactions with their end-users, just as it's not often not =
convenient for land-lords to go around trying to actively find tenants.
On Nov 29, 2010, at 11:20 PM, Leo Bicknell wrote:
> Broadband in the US is not in that boat. Too many consumers have
> a "choice" of a single provider. The vast majority of the rest
> have the "choice" of two providers.=20
I dunno. I've lived in areas where I had two dozen local providers vying =
for my last-mile residential connectivity business. Perhaps this is =
something for you to bring up with your local municipality, tell them to =
stop strangling the businesses that want to offer service to their =
residents.
But just because your elected officials aren't doing right by you =
doesn't mean that it justifies telling Comcast that they have to run =
their network, paid for with their money, according to yours or anyone =
else's rules.
D
