[8441] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: CIX connectivity
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lars Poulsen)
Fri Nov 19 04:04:21 1993
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 93 09:58:57 +0100
From: lars@eskimo.cph.cmc.com (Lars Poulsen)
To: bmanning@is.rice.edu, lars@eskimo.cph.cmc.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Actually Lars, Although the CIX is a good place to touchdown and
the MAE-EAST exchange is also a great place, the REAL place to get
transit is from the US regionals.
They attach to both coastal exchanges and for the most part are
AUP free internally. ANS, Alternet, Sprint, PSI and others
generally have agreements with one or more regionals to provide
transit for the membership of those regionals to other
regionals and/or the exchange points.
Shop around.... you might find a better deal than direct conection
with any of the direct carriers listed above.
I am geographically located in Europe, and my networking budget is
about $500/month for 3 workstations serving one person: My one-man
office. So a direct line to ALTERnet is not in my budget.
My network service provider is the local EUnet affiliate, and they
have contracted with ALTERnet to provide carriage. My routing is
affected by policy databases at EUnet, RIPE, CIX and MERIT.
I am comparing my connectivity to that of my parent office in Santa
Barbara, which is a commercial CIX customer. I cannot rule out that
that may have signed an AUP pledge, which I know that I have not.
The Santa Barbara office can get to a lot of places that are not
reachable from here. Most of these route via ANS from California,
so I can understand why I cannot get there, but others are NOT so
afflicted. For example, the route from California to LANL.GOV
goes from CERFnet through SDSC and General Atomics to ESnet without
crossing ANS.
The net result is that commercial customers end up having to source
route our mail like in the days of UUCP !!
I am confident that this, too, will settle down, but it will not be
resolved until there are AUP-free ways to get (almost) everywhere.
Participants in this group tend to pooh-pooh the misconception that
the Internet is a pure R&E environment, but the universal connectivity
that most of us enjoy comes about only because many commercial users
have signed the NSF AUP pledge. I think I will soon have to do that,
also.
/ Lars Poulsen
