Re: MCI Accepts Worldcom's Bid?

[Josh Richards <jrichard () fix net>]

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On Mon, 10 Nov 1997, Nathan Stratton wrote:

> On Mon, 10 Nov 1997, Karl Denninger wrote:
>
> > Frankly, this could be a *good* thing for the industry.  Among other things
> > large organizations have a habit and history of being unable to perceive
> > and act on market-based changes quickly enough to capitalize on them.  
> >
> > They tend to act like 900lb Gorillas instead, which is great if you're into
> > slow, plodding things, and not so good if you aren't fast enough to get
> > stepped on.  But eventually, stepping on people draws the fire of people 
> > on the DOJ side of the fence.
>
> I agree, I think this is a good thing for many NSPs. It is going to be a
> HUGE job to combine UUNET, ANS, and Internet MCI. They have huge hardware
> differences. ANS with the new BAY BCN hardware that they spent a large
> time developing, MCI with their large Stratacom network, and UUNet with
> their new Fore network. They all connect customers in a different way, it
> will take some time to bring all of that together. There will be major
> outages and problems associated with this merger. It will be a big change
> for other backbone providers to come in a take some of their customers
> base. It also will be easier to watch 1 big gorilla then 3 smaller ones. 
>
> -Nathan

This may not be good IMO..

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..)

- - Josh Richards / jrichard () fix net / Finger for PGP key -
- - Systems Administrator / FIX Net / http://www.fix.net -

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