[9169] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: an Internet buying coop?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lars Poulsen)
Mon Dec 20 09:09:52 1993
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 93 13:19:40 +0100
From: lars@eskimo.cph.cmc.com (Lars Poulsen)
To: tenney@netcom.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <199312200530.VAA12604@mail.netcom.com>
In article <199312200530.VAA12604@mail.netcom.com>
tenney@netcom.com (Glenn S. Tenney) writes:
> If I buy a single SLIP account, can I wire up my entire home
> and have a half dozen systems there all on the net for the same
> price as just my one machine? If not, why not?
Technically, it makes a great deal of difference whether you are
connecting one machine, with an IP address issued from the provider's
network address space; or you are connecting a subnet with an IP
network number issued to you. In the first case, you are being routed
as if you were just one more of the service provider's machines,
and the rest of the world does not have to know about you. In the
second case, your network number has to be in the routing tables
of all the major "backbone" networks' routers along with the 15,000
other entries; and the incremental cost is almost breaking the net.
(This is what BGP deployment, and CIDR is all about.)
This cost to your provider's technical administration and to the
netork at large may not be reflected in current pricing (because
we are trying to keep the pricing structures simple) but it is
a very real cost.
> If so, then what difference is it to the IP provider if those six
> machines are for my family or for my office building's coop?
If the six machines belong to you, the IP provider only needs to tell
*you* about it when there is upcoming maintenance, or a just-dicovered
outage or consideration of a change in price structures. If they belong
to you and five other small businesses in your building, the IP provider
may need to worry about whether you really will remember to discuss this
with your neighbors. The incremental cost may be small, and it may be
hard to measure (since it's part of what is "overhead" anyways) but
it is a real cost.
--
/ Lars Poulsen Internet E-mail: lars@CMC.COM
CMC Network Products Phone: (011-) +45-31 49 81 08
Hvidovre Strandvej 72 B Telefax: +45-31 49 83 08
DK-2650 Hvidovre, DENMARK Internets: designed and built while you wait
