[8950] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Rates, deals and No Diamonds
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert E. Seastrom)
Mon Dec 13 21:35:46 1993
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 11:33:20 +0900
From: "Robert E. Seastrom" <rs@intercon.com>
To: joseph@path.net (Joseph Stroup), com-priv@psi.com
> From: joseph@path.net (Joseph Stroup)
>
> Its certainly not sour grapes, I do love hearing that term and I know
> why you said it. I see Digex gets just about the service they pay for
> by the looks of the latest troubles at their site. I am very glad I am
> not and ANS customer. As far as I know I am the only one to ever FIRE
> them , ship the equipment back and say no thanks. Nothing will ever go
> into e-mail to express the relief I felt that day.
Eh? Most of the problems at Digex in recent weeks have had to do with a
dialtone drought. C&P Telephone finally getting off their butts and running
glass to Digex's offices has helped immensely in this problem. Should also
help solve their dialtone quality issues Server overloading has also
historically been a problem, but that has been dealt with as well.
I'm not saying that ANS and MCI aren't alarmingly efficient at blowing things
up and not noticing it until you call and bitch. In contrast, my pager goes
off whenever we lose our link to PSI (welcome to the wonderful world of
SNMP), and in the 3 times I have had to call them over the last 9 months,
they were *always* on top of it before I got to a phone to call them and had
already turned the circuit out to the telco for troubleshooting before I rang
them up in 2 out of the 3 cases. I'll betcha Alternet is the same way. I
know for a fact that Sprint is not, and moreover, I'm sure that ANS is not.
They certainly don't bother calling when they *know* the net is down because
of MCI et al...
I agree 100% with you that the NSFnet is supposed to be funded as a
production network, not a test network (like DARTnet is and ARPAnet was), and
that any company which uses piles of RS6000s as beta-test routers to shuffle
packets around a test network when it's under contract to provide a stable
production environment is exhibiting gross malfisance.
Now, in ANS's defense, do you remember what the NSFnet was like when JVNC was
running it? Ack.
> On the Digex thing I just wondered if Doug gave Percy Foster the 25% of
> Digital Express he promised him if they got their T-1 ?
Nice allegation, and indeed a reasonable deduction to make. But not true. I
know both Doug and Percy. Offering ANS 25% of Digex is not outside of what
Doug would consider, but only until his business sense got in the way.
There's no way he would ever consider it. Really. :-)
Now, from ANS's perspective, what Digex is doing is a very good thing,
particularly on the public-access Unix side. The more people know about the
Internet and think it's a cool thing, the less likely they are to lose their
pork-barrel. There is ample reason for ANS to cut Digex cheaper rates than
they cut everyone else without any kind of kickbacks or anything like that.
> Its a give to
> get world and while I don't blame Doug it just looks tacky...
If you believe that it's a "give to get world", I hope you never end up on
the other side of the bargaining table from most of the successful
entrepreneurs I know. They'll eat you alive.
> Remember : All whistleblowers sound like Sour grapes. I take those
> statements as compliments.
I agree with most of what you have to say about ANS, but I think that
bringing Digex into the picture dilutes your argument. They're a competitor
of yours, yes? Complaining that they are getting preferential treatment will
distract people from your main contentions that ANS has failed to live up to
its government contracts both in terms of deployment schedule and quality of
service, and that CO+RE represents a conflict of interest.
---Rob
