[9341] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Cost vs benefit of internet services
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Karl Denninger)
Wed Dec 29 18:26:14 1993
From: karl@mcs.com (Karl Denninger)
To: matthew@echo.com (Matthew Kaufman)
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1993 17:25:22 -0600 (CST)
Cc: com-priv@uu.psi.com, emv@garnet.msen.com
In-Reply-To: <199312292029.MAA16172@echo.com> from "Matthew Kaufman" at Dec 29, 93 12:29:53 pm
> > emv@garnet.msen.com (Edward Vielmetti):
> >
> > Find some small number of friends, incorporate, get a line to the
> > Internet, get some modems for your own in-dials, and bring the
> > cash price down yourself. (You are trading your time and effort
> > and aggregation of circuits for money.) If there are busy signals
> > you have only yourself and your colleagues to blame.
>
> Right. And then find that you've now become an IP reseller,
> so most of the current IP providers won't talk to you, except
> for ANS (very expensive) or Sprint. And then find that since
> you want AUP-free routing, your little effort has to join
> the CIX, so you're out another $10,000 / year.
> Oops. Ran out of money.
>
> Wouldn't it be nice if there weren't such artifically-constructed
> barriers to entry to IP resale, so that you really COULD get
> together with your small number of friends and get a line and
> share it?
>
> -matthew kaufman
> matthew@echo.com
I believe you grossly underestimate (1) the way these links are priced, (2)
capacity planning, (3) support issues and (4) the complexities of routing
multiple network numbers on the Internet.
Not necessarily in that order.
There is a <reason> that ANS charges $70k/year for unlimited volume on their
T1s. They could probably price it cheaper, but they also assume that there
will be some people (ie: not just phone lines + routers) bandwidth that they
will need to deal with.
Sprint is cheaper, but you had better know what you're doing -- I have never
gotten the impression that they had the technical resources that ANS does.
In fact, they feel a lot like a phone company (should this be a surprise?) :-)
The "Share a line" gig you're talking about just ends up costing your provider
4x the support load unless you're really running a NOC with the staff and all
that is entailed there.
That support load is not insignificant, nor is it cheap to find people who
are both good and willing to put up with handling problems at 3:00 AM,
especially when the majority of them are customer or phone-company caused.
Care to guess how often my pager goes off at 3:00 AM? Care to guess again
at how often the reason for the page is <really> a problem with MCSNet's
gear or software?
Hint: well under 20% of the time from our last set of statistics.
--
Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.COM) | MCSNet - First Interactive Internet and
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