Re: The Gorgon's Knot. Was: Re: Verio Peering Question

[Vadim Antonov <avg () exigengroup com>]

No, i'm not trying to say that Sprint isn't a sleazy big corporation,
it is, like any other.  Given the incentives sales people are given they
are actively discouraged from caring about company image or long-term
success.  Meeting their quotas and making comissions - that's the name of
the game, and exploiting situation of not their making isn't below them.

But the decision what and how to filter had no marketing or sales input
whatsoever (people who know me better would say that in an attempt to
provide such "input" these sales or marketing people would be told to
pluck themselves in a hurry). It was a pure engineering necessity, and
Sean did a very good job handling it.  Really saved the Internet, too.
Getting a large backbone beyond the stability threshold would've killed
more than just Sprint.

--vadim 


On Fri, 28 Sep 2001, Sean Donelan wrote:

> On Fri, 28 Sep 2001, Vadim Antonov wrote:
> > The reason for being very sensitive about routing tables was that ICM part
> > of things had quite arcane routing policies; and ability of AS1800
> boxes
> > to process updates in a timely fashion was quite vital for keeping
> > US-Europe Internet connectivity up and running.
>
> Yeah, I know.  Sometimes Sprint ICM was part of Sprint, other times it
> was that "other" network Sprint just happened to manage.
>
> > Marketing at that time was so clueless about Internet that they couldn't
> > even pronounce "routing filter", and definitely couldn't make a marketing
> > blitz out of it.
>
> Sprint kept the filters on for years afterwards.  It may have taken
> the clueless salespeople a few years, but they eventually did figure out
> how to recite the magic words "buy your circuit from sprint and you
> won't have problems with filters" was a way to win a sale.  And who
> could forget the popular "Don't buy a circuit from small ISP, because
> they won't be able to get past the Internet filters."  I went through
> a half-dozen Sprint sales people in different parts of the country,
> and by 1996 or so they all had the spiel down pat.
>
> I know, I should have taped their sales calls.