someone like exodus or qwest or at&t or uunet or abovenet would be very
likely to prevent their customers from directly cross-connecting.
mae-west (55 s market) won't allow it either. paix, equinix, switch and
data, and other "neutral colos" won't allow it to occur without a fee
but the fees are reasonable (unlike, say, the cross connect fees at
mae-west.)
UUNet's never put up any roadblocks for me in crossconnecting between
cabinets in their datacenters (2 cabinets belonging to different UUNet
customers). They've done it quickly too -- here's the response from a
UUNet engineer from the last time I asked:
> If this is NOT an Out-of-Band cross connect (POTS, ISDN, whatever)
> contacting your sales person will not be necessary. Are you simply
> attempting to join cabinets [X] and [Y] via a Cat5 connection??? If
> this is the case let me know what ports in the patch panels you want
> the cross connect terminated to and I can send the request to have
> this done today.
Their quote for bringing in outside bandwidth (having a circuit punched
down at the datacenter + crossconnected to a cabinet) was relatively
little too -- something to the tune of $50/month iirc.
At my request, they even allowed me to have a circuit run directly
through their datacenter bypassing their equipment altogether. I flipped
the bill for the UUNet-contracted outside vendor to do the cabling.
From what I've heard, Exodus is a bit more hell-bent on forcing customers
to use Exodus (err cw) bandwidth, but even they obviously make exceptions
for their larger customers (and perhaps those that threaten to walk?).
there's no answer to the question, as posed. "can you be more specific?"
I think the poster was inquiring as to common practice.
ISPs will do whatever they can to make a buck. In some cases this could
be forcing customers to use their own bandwidth by preventing
crossconnecting within their datacenter. In other cases, it could be
realizing that some customers require/value/will pay for such services.
In cases where there is little or no competition, it certainly seems like
the former would be more profitable (however disappointing).
Regards,
Adam