Re: Internet provider credibility - should it matter to the industry as a whole?

["James D. Butt 'J.D.'" <jbutt () mwci net>]

Can you please limit your postings to like one or mabey 2 lists and not 
like 5! I am sorry that I am replying to all of the lists that you posted 
to, but I feel that my message should go every where you sent your 
message.

Also I would assume that this release was done by some marketing person 
at ALLTEL....I would not want to find out what percent of press releases 
have inaccuricies such as this one and who knows it might be all true 
they might have 700 ISP customers????  As for the part about the routing 
table well it is sorta scary and could have been left out....

> I'd like to raise the question of the extent to which, amidst all the
> internet hype, the credibility of internet services providers in their
> public statements should matter. What follows is a notable case in point
> of a provider that just a year ago said that, instead of cooperation, the
> internet needed lawyers, and promised to use lawyers to whip the internet
> into shape. What if anything should anyone in the industry do about the
> following????

Gordon your posts make me angry some times! Be descent.

Yah lets sue AGIS for a bad press release!  If you go and 
sue all of the newspapers ect. ect. for inaccuracy's ect. 

Just so that I know other than peter saying many months ago about the 
whole lawyers thing, and that you and most of AGIS do not get along, what 
else has AGIS done to you?

Did you lose many teeth in fights during grade school?

You are not a AGIS customer. Yet you will trash them every chance you 
get. 

"SLANDER!" You make me think about the word "credibility".

"The COOK Report on Internet" = National Inquirer


On Thu, 24 Oct 1996, Gordon Cook wrote:

> I'd like to raise the question of the extent to which, amidst all the
> internet hype, the credibility of internet services providers in their
> public statements should matter. What follows is a notable case in point
> of a provider that just a year ago said that, instead of cooperation, the
> internet needed lawyers, and promised to use lawyers to whip the internet
> into shape. What if anything should anyone in the industry do about the
> following????
>
> > From  a press release on the AGIS web server
> http://www.agis.net/press17.htm:
>
> Press release: Little Rock, AR: October 23, 1996-- ALLTEL Corporation will
> invest **up to** $12.5 million and become a minority investor in Apex
> Global Information Services, Inc. (AGIS), one of only six global providers
> of Internet access, Joe T. Ford, chairman and CEO of ALLTEL, has
> announced. [Cook: emphasis added.]
>
> AGIS is currently serving more than 200 cities in the United States with
> points of presence (POPs) for Internet access, and has dedicated service
> available in almost 50 countries. In addition, the company provides
> backbone services to more than 700 of the estimated 3000 Internet service
> providers (ISPs) around the world.
>
> Cook: 700 isps? Gosh. That's impressive. Anyone got any data on when they
> overtook MCI, Sprint, and UUNET in market share? Leased line access to
> almost 50 countries round the world? Any one seen the map of their global
> network? Anyone got a list of their foreign pops? Or are they claiming
> LDDS lines and POPs in this country and abroad as though they (AGIS) owned
> them all???
>
> Press release: "This venture is an investment by ALLTEL in the
> communications link of the future," Ford continued. "ALLTEL is making this
> investment because AGIS is one of only six global providers of Internet
> access. 
>
> Cook: six global providers: Hmmm. Might they be referring to Sprint, AGIS
> UUNET, PSI, MCI, and ANS? The so called gang or club of six that a year
> ago were the exclusive direct peers at all the major exchanges? If they
> are, then, by process of elimnation, BBN is not a global provider -which I
> think is news to BBN, nor is AT&T, nor is Advantis, nor is Compuserve, nor
> are a lot of other major players with more than a fresh12.5 million behind
> them.   Gee. I wonder if BBN realizes that AGIS has relegated it to second
> rank status?
>
> Or perhaps they are referring to those global providers who are beginning
> to move most of their traffic through private inter connects - and in so
> doing are becoming a new internet apex? In this case they are not even one
> of the five let alone six. Here the five are MCI, Sprint, BBN, UUNET and
> ANS. I have been talking to a lot of sources, none of which is aware of
> AGIS having any private Interconnects with these five.
>
> Press release: It is these providers that have management control of the
> Internet routing tables, which are the directories that identify the
> location of all Internet users.
>
> Cook: An enormously inaccurate statement. I would surmise that if any six
> providers had the kind of control being talked about, there would have
> been a brouhaha on mail lists worse than that directed against NSI, and
> that there would be anti-trust action under way. Of course they also tell
> you how to get to other routers and not a thing about the location of the
> several tens of millions of individual internet users.
>
> Of course this is a press release and those who place too great a trust in
> the overall accuracy of press releases are likely to be disappointed. In
> my opinion however, the general cluelessness displayed by this press
> release reaches new heights. It leaves me to surmise that the folk at
> ALLTEL know not a lot about the internet. It would be interesting to
> review the due dilligence that was excercised in putting this agreement
> together. For example did anyone at ALLTELL ask for archives of
> agislist () interstice com which was started in January by agis customers
> complaining about agis service? A very recent post from this mail list
> follows.
>
> Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 13:34:43 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Veggy Vinny <richardc () CSUA Berkeley EDU>
> To: agislist () inter2 interstice com
> Subject: Hi
>
> Hi everyone,
>
>         My name is Vince Poy, and I'm the Unix Networking Operations
> person for GaiaNet.Net located in Beverly Hills, California connected to
> PBI.Net which uses AGIS.Net, we've been having major problems with lag
> with AGIS.Net and was wondering if anyone else can share their
> experiences...
>
> Press release: concluding with a flourish:  AGIS provides Internet access
> to millions of users via an extensive customer base of RBOCs, content
> providers, large corporations and ISPs.
>
> Cook: it would be entertaining to see how they derived these figures.
>
> And from nanog today we heard:
>
> Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 15:25:40 -0400 (EDT)
> From: JDF <lart () cais net>
> To: nanog () merit edu
> Cc: agislist () interstice com, Ron Burleson <burleson () cais net>
> Subject: Inter-provider relations
>
>
>         Interesting speech from Peter Kline at NANOG today...it seems that
> AGIS's peering requirements are now so strict that AGIS today would not
> peer with AGIS of only a few months ago.
>         Then there's Peter's comment to Ron Burleson, Cheif Operating
> Officer of CAIS Internet (some of you know that CAIS had a very good
> relationship with Net99, which continued for a while under AGIS.)  "Ron,
> we're going to squish you like a bug."
>         Peter is doing wonders for inter-provider relations.  What do
> y'all say that the rest of us follow the older, more friendly model,
> instead of trying to kill each other?
>         Sure, a lot of us are in competition.  From today's speech, it
> seems that AGIS is is more competition than the rest of us.
>  But personally, if I were a small or mid-size provider, I'd rather
> buy service from somebody that I've seen to be in /friendly/ competition
> with their peers -- that way, once I got big enough to strike out on my
> own, I could stay friendly with my old provider on a peer instead of a
> customer level.  This was the intention with the Net99 deal, back when
> Net99 was known as "the backbone that doesn't suck."
>
>         Back to the point -- like it or not, we all rely on each other and
> each others' networks to make the Internet happen.
>         We can follow the AGIS model and cut each others' throats until we
> really are just a bunch of autonomous systems with the occasional path
> between, or we can interconnect -- network, to use a more laoded term.
>         I think we should be a network.
>
>         (Please note that while I am speaking only for myself, CAIS's
> business plan is more on the friendly side.)
>
>
>
>
>
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James D. Butt                      |               voice 319.557.8463
Network Engineer                   |                 fax 319.557.9771
MidWest Communications, Inc.       |               pager 319.557.6347 
241 Main St.                       |                     noc () mwci net 
Dubuque, IA  52001                 |             email jbutt () mwci net
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