Re: MCI Accepts Worldcom's Bid?

[Nathan Stratton <nathan () robotics net>]

On Mon, 10 Nov 1997, Josh Richards wrote:

> If these 2 (or 3) of the larger transport providers consolidate their
> networks completely, what about the loss of multiple paths and greater
> potential for outages without redundancy?  Instead of going via MCI's
> backbone or via UUNet's (or whoever) they are all then one and the same. 
> I realize that combining doesn't mean eliminating one of them, but if they
> are managed by a single entity... 
>
> ...The potential for an enormous outage would be much greater.  All of
> these spoken of providers carry a decent amount of Internet traffic (not
> going to make a guess, since we just had that thread about how "accurate"
> statistics are..)

YES, that is my point. I think the potential for outages is much greater,
I also think that in the process of merging them together there will be
major outages and problems. That is why I think other backbone providers
will be able to pull customers from Worldcom. It is possible that  
internetMCI, ANS, and UUNet all would be operated as separate units, but I
don't think so. The cost savings of one network is very large, and 
Worldcom will want that savings. This will benefit other backbone
providers, because they will be able to acquire ANS, UUNet, and
internetMCI customers when Worldcom runs into the merging problems. 

-Nathan