I have just had a phone call from a particpant in the news conference of
the well. What UUNET is doing to many of its peers, including the Well, is
now clear. According to my caller, Dave Hughes, it has served notice to
many if not most of its peers that, in late May and early June, it will
either terminate their peering session or that the peers will have to
start paying for the privilege. How much will be charged and under what
conditions is unknown. Why? Because the unfortunate peers either have to
**sign non disclosure agreements before** they even sit down with UUNET or
simply be cut off.
I first heard an opaque reference to this from a nationally known figure a
couple of months ago. In the last 10 days I have heard separately and
privately from three different people one of whom is directly affected. I
asked him to call me. He never did. Now I think I understand why. Hughes
said that David (?) Hollub who is responsible for the Well's connectivity
and has just been fired by Bruce Katz the well's owner has revealed in a
well conference what UUNET is doing and that the story made it into the
wall street journal today.
I will be sending Hughes a summary understanding of what I think this
means that he will post on the Well inviting national journalists to call
me for whatever information/insight I can give them into the story. I
would especially like to begin hearing from those directly affected.
Please detail very precisely what restrictions you place on the
information you send me.
First it was AGIS (but who cares about AGIS?). Now UUNET. Tomorrow who?
MCI? As UUNET and others of the big five move to consolidate their
markets.......... let UUNET put the smaller national backbones against the
wall and whom do the rest of ISP's have to rely on? Those ISPs who did
not get hit in UUNET's first round of cuts. Will you get it in the neck in
the second or the third round?
First it was AGIS (but who cares about AGIS?). Now UUNET. Tomorrow who?
MCI? As UUNET and others of the big five move to consolidate their
markets.......... let UUNET put the smaller national backbones against the
wall and whom do the rest of ISP's have to rely on? Those ISPs who did
not get hit in UUNET's first round of cuts. Will you get it in the neck in
the second or the third round?
The only thing UUNET is cutting is Internet trees, and there are some who
are protesting by hugging them. Clear out the chaff for next seasons
crops.
Buying connectivity from an ISP who peers with UUNET, or buying direct
from UUNET, is a lot cheaper then building a national DS-3/OC-3 backbone
and trying to be default free - this is not about UUNET cuting throats,
it's about large and small ISP's examining thier business model.
.stb
Sure, if UUNET was only cutting peering with small ISPs who were only at
one NAP, and had peering because of a backdoor deal years ago. It appears
that UUNET is cutting peering with those medium-sized ISPs who *have*
built a national DS-3/OC-3 backbone. I really don't see how squeezing the
medium-sized ISPs who have already invested the millions of dollars it
takes to build a national backbone helps anyone but UUNET.
I see this as a direct attack on the smaller regional and national ISPs
who have been taking customers away from UUNET because of better
performance and better service.
The issue here isn't getting other ISPs to examine their business model.
If an ISP has already installed a national network, they have either done
their research, figured their costs and potential gains, and invested the
money wisely, or they are made of money, and since few ISPs I know of are
made of money, I'll bet they did the background work. One of the reasons
to install a national network is that some large ISPs state flat-out that
they won't consider peering unless you are are connected to a certain
number of naps with at at least T3/OC3 speeds, which is a reasonable
requirement, but to tell someone that, and then either raise the standards
to an illogical level (guess which national ISP said someone would have to
have at least 100 coast-to-coast T3s to even be considered for peering
recently) or just plain terminate peering with all but the largest ISPs
seems underhanded at best.
It's UUNET's network, and they can do what they want with it, but
UUNET/Worldcom/MFS won't be getting much more business from us if these
actions continue.
According to several news reports I read on Monday/Tuesday, UUNet & The
WELL kissed & made up. Is this no longer the casse?
BTW, you can read about the David Hollub saga at:
http://www.news.com:80/News/Item/0,4,10247,00.html
Randy Benn
Gordon Cook wrote:
Jeremiah Kristal wrote:
Sure, if UUNET was only cutting peering with small ISPs who were only at
one NAP, and had peering because of a backdoor deal years ago. It appears
that UUNET is cutting peering with those medium-sized ISPs who *have*
built a national DS-3/OC-3 backbone. I really don't see how squeezing the
medium-sized ISPs who have already invested the millions of dollars it
takes to build a national backbone helps anyone but UUNET.
I see this as a direct attack on the smaller regional and national ISPs
who have been taking customers away from UUNET because of better
performance and better service.
I see this as driven by practicality and economics.
- Eight or so "national backbones" have materialized in the last year.
Each
one of those requires that engineering devise and then implement
a routing policy, each of which is different than all the others
written before because of a different combination of exchange points
the new net is present at and how well things are going at the various
EPs at any given time. When some of these "national backbones" are
advertising a total of 5 or six nets, how practical is this? It's
easier to static route them and forget about it.
- BGP peering sessions cost money. Few people seem to understand this.
All
routers from all manufacturers have some practical limit to how many
BGP sessions they can support while simultaneously forwarding packets.
(In fact, one manufacturer recommends that you use a router solely as
a router server to maintain sessions and feed forwarding info to
other routers in order to allow them to concentrate on forwarding
packets.)
Every time you have to put in a new router to manage BGP sessions
that don't generate revenue and don't forward packets, you have to
try and figure out if it's economically worthwhile.
- The exchange points have become impractical for the largest players;
it's
just too hard to diagnose performance problems between two nets when
there's a piece neither of them controls in between. Thus we have
private interconnects. Private interconnects are circuitwise
inexpensive
when the two nets are in the same POP already, but not when actual
local loops are involved. Also, a private interconnect requires a
high speed port which costs real money on each end. You want to get
your money's worth out of each one of those ports, which means it
needs fairly high utilitization to be justified; a DS3 port
moving 2Mpbs is not justifiable. So network
interconnection is an issue of both practicality and economics.
- So, in order to provide the best service possible to their customers,
the largest nets have gone to private interconnects amongst themselves.
This means that they now have these expensive connections to
the various exchange points which they maintain in order to
move a small percentage of their total exchange traffic. Again,
this can appear economically questionable. Every one of these
nets wants to become and stay profitable, and the way to do it
is to reduce unnecessary fixed/recurring costs whereever possible.
People who've not directly worked on or managed a heavily loaded net
may not appreciate everything I've said.
-peter
Gordon;
In my view, UUNET and PSI were the second to try to put the Big Squeeze on,
with the CIX filtering incident with the original "settlements" squeeze
that ANS tried to perpetrate on the NSFNET regionals as the historic first.
The CIX filtering idea was that the smaller ISPs should be forced to pay a
$10k fee in the hope that they might be encouraged to buy transit instead.
Sprint forced the issue by welcoming the smaller ISP market while MCI
waffled, UUNET said "No way", and PSI said "It depends". Then along comes
Net99 and the backbone market blows wide open and now everyone resells
bandwidth. Not good for the big backbones.
When UUNET says "sure we'll peer with you, but we don't need no stinkin'
contract" and when MCI and others will sign a contract but only for a year,
what do you expect to happen someday? Pretty clever about the NDA -- it
kept the lid on for over a month.
Backbones are expensive, but hard to value to the customer. Bandwidth
resale leaves too much margin for small ISPs to make money, in the view of
the backbone providers. The market can't support thirty-five separate
backbones, even were they all to be "MFS-no-money-down" instant backbones,
as I sometimes think they are. 
Sooner or later, the Big Squeeze will work. If not now, then next year. If
your business plan competes head-to-head with a facilities-based ISP, then
you'd better think hard about how to change it, because there just aren't
going to be that many facilities-based ISPs in future.
--Kent
Actually, it could become about not buying from MFS/Worldcom/UUNET.
It just became that way for MCSNet, for example.
Vote with your wallets. Both parties get equal value out of a peering
exchange. The originating site got paid by their customer, and the
terminating side got paid by theirs.
Trying to extort money to peer is exactly that - extortion.
The argument about national backbones costing money is a red herring. OF
COURSE they cost money. But they open business markets to you that are
otherwise closed - being able to sell in multiple cities without the customer
having to backhaul on their own, VPNs across geographical areas, etc. If you
don't like the price:performance balance of that equation, then you shouldn't
build one.
Trying to extort money to peer is exactly that - extortion.
Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.Net)| MCSNet - The Finest Internet Connectivity
I asked our telecommunications attorney, who bats 1000 in such matters,
about the issues involved. His reply:
The action is probably anticompetitive. The problem is that the anti-trust
laws are so hard, costly and time-consuming to enforce in civil matters,
and for criminal you must get the state or federal authorities interested.
To obtain relief you have to show intent and ability to monopolize. This
is not a price squeeze -- to the contrary. You have to show concerted
action. Market power. Damages.
Notwithstanding my statement above about the authorities, I'd recommend all
who are concerned go to the justice department and seek an investigation.
That or even the threat often mitigates behavior.
Larry Vaden, founder and CEO help-desk 903-813-4500
Internet Texoma, Inc. <http://www.texoma.net> direct line 903-870-0365
bringing the real Internet to rural Texomaland fax 903-868-8551
Member of TISPA and ISP/C pager 903-867-6571
Now how pathetic is this? UUNET one of the original pioneers of the
Commercial Internet, one of the Flagships of open systems, standards, and
connectivity now wants to extort money from other networks for peering? As
if they don't make enough money. Gee wouldn't it really suck for all of
UUNet's customers and MSN etc if a company like ConXion no longer had UUNET
peering? Gee they couldn't download any Microsoft products anymore! True,
UUNET is big, true they have many good sites and on-line resources for
customers. But, they are not so good that they deserve some mega-high price
for the honor of accessing their customers. After all, why do you need a
confidentiality agreement if your prices are reasonable? Put a gag-order on
people from complaining about pricing...
This is also practically extortion. "Yes, we are peers, we have already
decided that our customers and yours would benefit, but YOU and YOUR
customers should pay to access ours...." Maybe everyone should pull out of
peering with UUNET and tell them they need to pay US to peer. Just my $0.02
I am all for a commercial Internet, but this takes it WAY to far for my
tastes. At least true telecom carriers are regulated in what they can
charge for interconnects by the FCC or another governmental body in their
own country. Sheesh..
Send all flames to: dev@null.com
Well, the thing to do here is simple. If you are a UUNet customer bitch
at them and bitch loud. Customers are the people they will listen to...no
matter how much we decrease the S/N ratio on NANOG I doubt they will
listen to non-customers posting to NANOG.
Call your UUNet sales rep and inform him/her you would like to terminate
your contract. Tell him/her you signed that contract under the assumption
that UUNet would peer equally with all networks meeting a minimum standard
for NAPs connected to, backbone bandwidth, etc. Make it very clear you
will not tolerate your connectivity becoming worse because of UUNet
dropping peering.
Obviously discussions with sales reps. has little to do with NANOG. I
don't think this really becomes an operations issue until someone says
"no" to UUNet. And you thought the DNS was going to fracture the 'net...
Bradley Dunn
Explain to me how it is cheaper to pay UUNET for a full DS3 from
Boston-Washington, Wasington to Chicago, Washington to San Jose, Chicago to
San Jose, Washington to NYC at $60,000 each not including telco or transit.
Than it is to pay a telco alone for just the lines? I'd love to see how the
numbers work out on that!
If your plan is to sell connectivity nationwide or semi-nationwide it is
absurdly more expensive to use UUNET than to do it yourself.
Yes, if you are a local ISP and never intend to sell anything outside of
your area, it -MIGHT- possibly be cheaper. However, at $60,000 per DS3
circuit not including telco/transit as opposed to even a $25,000 WorldComm
circuit -END TO END- I still don't see how the math works, unless you are a
UUNET reseller which wouldn't explain why you are building a network yourself.