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WORTH READING "not rely on carriers" ????
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:54:54 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: mo () ccr org (Mike O'Dell) Date: October 29, 2008 8:03:06 PM EDT To: dave () farber net Subject: "not rely on carriers" ???? this is an interesting tale, but if you don't "rely" on carriers, what exactly do you plan to use for wires and fiber? surely you are not suggesting simply re-implementing it all somehow (or even just the parts you like). people seem to forget what a carrier really is. first and foremost, it's a business entity which can successfully raise enough money to build and operate communication infrastructure. that involves cutting deals for rights of way, negotiating with regulatory bodies at the local, state, national, and international levels, deploying a lot of hardware, and then owning and operating that hardware. note that nothing I said up to this point says anything about "business models". whether a carrier's service is selling IRUs for dark fiber, access to lambdas, point-to-point 10gigEthernet, or any other interface exposed by transport equipment is interesting only to the degree it determines whether they sell what you want to buy. the most important fact is: carriers move bits. that's it. that's the killer app for true carriers. there are ISPs which provide global delivery of IP packets by using the bit-moving services of carriers. they add other infrastructure on top of the bit-pipes supplied by carriers and generate Internet Service from it. Note: it is not uncommon to find a carrier and an ISP squished into the same higher-level corporate entity (usually indicated by pervasive logo stains), but there *are* two different entities inside there. it's the upper-level logo who is blenderizing the "business models". these upper-level logos often peddle other wares, too, but they are of concern only to the degree they get in the way of using the carrier or ISP services. this picture is obviously simplified - some carriers specialize in escorting bits across ocean passages. the dollars required to do that magic are considered large by "dry-land" carriers, and dry-land carriers can spend multiple hundreds of millions of dollars on deployment with surprising ease. why? the world is a big place, and as we used to say, "The fiber am where the fiber is." it doesn't go everywhere and cannot go everywhere, so some places are more equal than others when it comes to delivering different kinds of bit-pipe service. the same is true for every other bit-pipe technology. so what i really don't understand is what part of this we can do without? certainly the brain-damaged blenderizing of business models could be jettisoned, but i don't see how you build anything like what we now know as "The Global Big-I Internet" without fiber and submarine cables and metro distribution and local tails. and like it or not, unless you intend to completely re-implement all of that, you are going to need the facilities of "carriers". true, it would be nice if they would find a way to be happy with their true killer app, but that doesn't make those bit pipes less necessary. -mo ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- WORTH READING "not rely on carriers" ???? David Farber (Oct 29)