From: Fletcher E Kittredge [mailto:fkittred@gwi.net]
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2001 11:35 AM
To: Kavi, Prabhu
Cc: 'Vadim Antonov'; Christian Kuhtz; nanog@merit.edu
Subject: Re: MPLS VPNs or not?> I guess the real question should be how much market cap did other
> companies lose because of certain people's zealotry? Any answers
> Vadim?Prabhu;
What evidence do you have that:
1) UUnet is/was a success,
My take is that the best measures of success is market acceptance
and profitability. Not a perfect measure, but certainly beats
alternatives like academic debates like protocol X is evil, or
service provider Y sucks. If protocol X is evil, ISPs will not
use it, or those that do use it will fail. If protocol X was
useful but has outlived its usefulness (e.g. ATM in the core),
ISPs will no longer use it. [Note that I am not against academic
discussions. However they are only useful until market deployment
has proven them right or wrong. The people who are still against
ATM on religous grounds should get over it.]
If service provider Y sucks, then customers will leave it.
Neither happened to UUNET.
2) if it was a success, the determining factor was its use of ATM,
rather than its first mover advantage,
financial/management stucture,
industry trends, etc. For example, UUnet used ATM because that was
what the bellheads would sell them. At the time, there was no
alternative to the bellheads.
First of all, UUNET got a lot of things right. As Craig said, they
were an excellent ISP. Those factors you mentioned were all important.
However a significant roadblock in any one area can slow down your
growth. At one time, UUNET's traffic was simply outrunning the
ability of L3 routers to keep up. Their choices were to:
1. Adapt to another network architecture that scaled
2. Have a poor network that did not scale, and therefore
would drop lots of customer traffic
3. Refuse customers that wanted to sign on.
Taking positions 2 or 3 would have caused them to lose market
share. They took position 1 and, combined with doing many other
things right, maintained their growth.
And as I already mentioned in another message, UUNET's network ran
directly over TDM. I don't know what you mean about what the Bellheads
would sell them.
Prabhu