Re: sprint passes uu?
i wrote: transit prices have been in free fall, and worldcom has not been following them downward. however, after the cleansing ritual of chapter 11, i think they will be in a fine position to reset their per-megabit charges in ways that make them a compelling transit provider. their network's been great. several people answered me, privately. i'm going to respond publically but preserve anonymity: But WorldCon billing is a nightmare. We'd really like to stay connected to UUNet, but WorldCon's inability to bill us in accordance with our contract and insistance that we pay bills they know are complete works of fiction make it really difficult. there is a curious mixture of fact and fiction in the general response to a uunet bill. in their version of banded rates, you don't know what rate you will owe until the end of the month, but you pay your commit at the start of the month (or at least that's what MIBH was doing, since the overall costs were lower in that case). i usually found that if i read my uunet bill by candlelight during a new moon, i was able to figure out what it all meant and tie it all back to some kind of reality. i know that there are also just plain errors in some of the bills i've been a third party to. however, these errors are no wierder than the ones on my SBC/PacBell frame relay bills. remember as you read these things that IP providers are resisting commodotization, and that means they have to give out quotes, contracts, and invoices that do not map apples to apples against a competitor's quotes, contracts, or invoices. this is creativity for the sake of creativity, and i'd like to see it end, but i don't know how or when that can happen. the real debate is about actual measured cost per bit or per bit-kilometer, and to that end, this next anonymized reply attempts to go there: I got Worldcom to quote me $170/meg for a 100Mb commitment about a month ago. If that's not freefall, I don't know what is. that's not freefall. get yourself a quote from cogent or level(3), for examples. at $170/Mbit for 100Mbit/sec commit you are either paying for name brand or you're paying for quality of on-net service to their other customers or you're just plain getting brutalized. note that $170/Mbit is actually below cost for any network smaller than sprint's or uunet's, once you figure in the people, the routes, the rent, and the depreciation, and then fuzz it based on economies of scale. however, the market hasn't bottomed yet, and most people still don't know what their costs are. once we bottom out and start regenerating, $200/Mbit to $300/Mbit for wholesale high-commit transit is going to be just about right, given the single-digit NPM that you get from high capital long term commodity plays. let's talk about network quality, though: their network's been great. modulo a couple of recent multi-hour meltdowns (one nationwide one regional), yes. i can remember similar meltdowns in sprint, teleglobe, abovenet, mci, cw, psi, qwest, and att (both voice and data for att). most of these networks were grown immaturely, without offline simulation of either current or proposed changed topologies. indeed, most of them are too large to simulate offline, so the only system level testing they get is the live kind. equipment vendors and routing protocols have been in continuous flux. periodic meltdowns do not indicate either incompetence or lack of investment, merely that there's been more growth than was sane. (in other words, the dotcom overshoot in networking was technical, not just fiscal.) uunet's network is still as good as they come, and the people who keep it running are still near the top of the field. (though i understand there's been some personnel runoff during the chapter 11.)
Re: sprint passes uu?
note that $170/Mbit is actually below cost for any network smaller than sprint's or uunet's, once you figure in the people, the routes, the rent, and the depreciation, and then fuzz it based on economies of scale. however, the market hasn't bottomed yet, and most people still don't know what their costs are. once we bottom out and start regenerating, $200/Mbit to $300/Mbit for wholesale high-commit transit is going to be just about right, given the single-digit NPM that you get from high capital long term commodity plays. This is total and udder rubbish, the same kind that took one of the best networks out there and destroyed it. CGS has a very strict definition. CGS of a company A that gets goods from B does not care about B having negative margins. There is a number of good providers that provide very limited service at a rate of under $100 Mbit/sec. An Enterprising Co takes transit from two of those companies paying $100 Mbit/sec to each. Adding a few services, one of which is called inhouse customer service that does not rely on former security guards paid $5.25 per hour and happily resell it at $300 per Mbit/sec. Factoring real salary costs, real equipment costs and real depreciation schedules, the Enterprising Co manages to make money hands over fist because it does not spend $80MM USD to built 15,000 sq. feet of space. Alex
RE: sprint passes uu?
I'm curious to know how many of those UU customers are just waiting for their contracts to expire before giving them the big F.U. -Original Message- From: Richard A Steenbergen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2002 7:09 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Brian; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: sprint passes uu? On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 07:25:15PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's hard to know how large a percentage though without knowing how many Sprint customers are also UU customers. i.e. The combination of Sprint and UU customer routes could still be just 47637 prefixes, though I'm sure it's somewhere between that and 47637+45410. It's certainly not 47637+45410, which would falsely suggest that together Sprint and UU have roughly 80% of the internet as customers. Well, just by checking the big providers off the top of my head, I come up with: ASN Routes Common Name -- --- 1239 47711 Sprint 701 45429 UU 3561 23205 CW 7018 23154 ATT 120231 BBN/Genuity 209 17082 Qwest 3356 12587 Level 3 3549 12175 GBLX 6453 10403 Teleglobe 2914 8791 Verio 6461 8089 MFN/AboveNet 4200 7506 Aleron/Agis 1299 6773 Telia 5511 4261 OpenTransit 4637 4066 Reach 16631 2067 Cogent 2828 1842 XO 4006 1727 NetRail/Cogent - 256984 Which of course ignores many dozens of 1-2k route providers. Now, of course number of routes has absolutily nothing to do with amount of traffic (ex: AOL, which anounces 400 some routes (and a lot of those are RoadRunner) but is one of if not the single the most important sink of traffic in the world), but it's interesting nevertheless. -- Richard A Steenbergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)
Re: sprint passes uu?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Shawn Solomon) writes: I'm curious to know how many of those UU customers are just waiting for their contracts to expire before giving them the big F.U. transit prices have been in free fall, and worldcom has not been following them downward. however, after the cleansing ritual of chapter 11, i think they will be in a fine position to reset their per-megabit charges in ways that make them a compelling transit provider. their network's been great. -- Paul Vixie
Re: sprint passes uu?
transit prices have been in free fall, and worldcom has not been following them downward. however, after the cleansing ritual of chapter 11, i think they will be in a fine position to reset their per-megabit charges in ways that make them a compelling transit provider. their network's been great. -- Paul Vixie Yes, the network is, and always has been great. (well, except for that one little blip a couple of weeks ago...) In our seven year relationship we were always impressed with the the NOC staff and support group at UUnet. However auditing their invoices was always an exercise in frustration. Circuits that were long-ago cancelled re-appearing time and time again, blatant overcharges, completely incomprehensible account number changes. I used to think it was incompetence or confusion caused by growth and acquisitions (having some personal experience with the latter.) I guess it has been recently revealed as felonious behavior. I'd be a fool to go down that path again. I'm sorry to say but, I'll be officiating ice hockey games in hell before doing business with UUnet again. -- Chuck Goolsbee V.P. Technical Operations _ digital.forest Phone: +1-877-720-0483, x2001 where Internet solutions grow Int'l: +1-425-483-0483 19515 North Creek ParkwayFax: +1-425-482-6871 Suite 208 http://www.forest.net Bothell, WA 98011email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: sprint passes uu?
Their acctg issues are widely known, as well as their 99 pricing in 2001. Hook up with a customer of theirs as a provider and let the provider duke it out with em. A lot of folks like to dual home with Sprint and UUnet, and that solution does get you a lot from a networking perspective. Bri On Wed, 16 Oct 2002, chuck goolsbee wrote: transit prices have been in free fall, and worldcom has not been following them downward. however, after the cleansing ritual of chapter 11, i think they will be in a fine position to reset their per-megabit charges in ways that make them a compelling transit provider. their network's been great. -- Paul Vixie Yes, the network is, and always has been great. (well, except for that one little blip a couple of weeks ago...) In our seven year relationship we were always impressed with the the NOC staff and support group at UUnet. However auditing their invoices was always an exercise in frustration. Circuits that were long-ago cancelled re-appearing time and time again, blatant overcharges, completely incomprehensible account number changes. I used to think it was incompetence or confusion caused by growth and acquisitions (having some personal experience with the latter.) I guess it has been recently revealed as felonious behavior. I'd be a fool to go down that path again. I'm sorry to say but, I'll be officiating ice hockey games in hell before doing business with UUnet again. -- Chuck Goolsbee V.P. Technical Operations _ digital.forest Phone: +1-877-720-0483, x2001 where Internet solutions grow Int'l: +1-425-483-0483 19515 North Creek ParkwayFax: +1-425-482-6871 Suite 208 http://www.forest.net Bothell, WA 98011email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: sprint passes uu?
Valdis writes: | About the only conclusion that you can *safely* draw is that Sprint has a | more complicated network than UU does. This runs contrary to many years of architecture and design philosophy, and indeed to deployment history based upon that. Obviously we could have very different ideas about what is complicated and what is not, or a misunderstanding about what you think is complicated in our network. However, Sprint has been de-complicating its IP network for many years, ripping out channel banks in the transition to full T1s, ripping out a layer of PDH MUXes in the T1-T3 upgrade cycle, ripping out PDH altogether while *not* adopting ATM in the deployment of POS, and then ultimately ripping out reliance upon the SONET layer in the upgrade to POS over virtual back-to-back fibre at 2.5 and 10Gbps. This has eliminated not just equipment and protocols, but also all the processes involved in provisioning and maintaining them. I call that de-complication. Sprint has also carefully layed out its virtual L1 topology to completely avoid the need to roll out MPLS (a complicated forwarding paradigm, with an even more complicated control plane) in order to move traffic cost-effectively and with on average zero congestion. In short, Sprint's approach contrasts with other networks' approach by requiring alot of extremely clever thinking well in advance of deploying, including preparing fallbacks in case something is predicted incorrectly. Alot of that thinking goes into long-term minimization of the need to steer the network once it is deployed. I think this is less complicated than a network which requires a VC-or-ER-based L2 that requires rearranging as traffic grows between step-change buildouts. | Now *hopefully*, they have more customers too We would be happy to add you to the list of customers, especially if you were to connect in Europe. -:) | or the Sprint backbone engineers will have to carry a much higher | complexity/customer ratio, which means when the senior engineers | finally snap under the pressure, we'll get junior engineers making | weird work-arounds that will just complicate things 5 years down | the road. This also runs contrary to many years of history. Having [sb]een a number of generations of Sprintlink engineers over the years, I think the most troublesome complexity/customer issue has involved the interconnect between Sprint's access routers and Sprint's customers. As this is universal -- perhaps excepting some networks operated by LECs -- and is tied up on matters involving OSI Layers 8 and 9, it is astonishing that you have this view while Sprintlink has notably not suffered from weird workarounds done bye junior engineers since about the time that I was one. | Oh wait.. that already happened at most carriers, didn't it? That's where we | got the CURRENT crop of senior engineers.. ;) Well, you could be right, leaving Sprint as an unusal case, since as with its world-beating pro-simplification architecture, Sprint has enjoyed a world-class team almost without interruption since the early 1990s. Sean. ([EMAIL PROTECTED], again, incidentally...) - -- Sean Doran [EMAIL PROTECTED] (home target of NANOG and spam) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Sprint, 1 Pall Mall East, London SW1Y 5AU, UK)
Re: sprint passes uu?
On Tue, 15 Oct 2002 17:03:17 EDT, Richard A Steenbergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Looks like UU routes have been steadily falling, dunno if they aggregated (hah!) or just lost customers due to, well, you know. But by the metrics people/reporters have been using to declare UU half the internet, it looks like they're now #2. Well.. yeah.. but my hypothetical 64 /8's are twice address space than your hypothetical 2,097,152 /24's. About the only conclusion that you can *safely* draw is that Sprint has a more complicated network than UU does. Now *hopefully*, they have more customers too, or the Sprint backbone engineers will have to carry a much higher complexity/customer ratio, which means when the senior engineers finally snap under the pressure, we'll get junior engineers making weird work-arounds that will just complicate things 5 years down the road. Oh wait.. that already happened at most carriers, didn't it? That's where we got the CURRENT crop of senior engineers.. ;) -- Valdis Kletnieks Computer Systems Senior Engineer Virginia Tech msg06035/pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: sprint passes uu?
VK Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 17:25:21 -0400 VK From: Valdis Kletnieks RAS Looks like UU routes have been steadily falling, dunno if RAS they aggregated (hah!) or just lost customers due to, well, RAS you know. But by the metrics people/reporters have been RAS using to declare UU half the internet, it looks like RAS they're now #2. VK Well.. yeah.. but my hypothetical 64 /8's are twice address VK space than your hypothetical 2,097,152 /24's. One would expect 701 and 1239 to have a similar number of similarly-sized customers. Perhaps flow data for _701_x$ and _1239_y$ (some overlap between x and y) would be more accurate. Eddy -- Brotsman Dreger, Inc. - EverQuick Internet Division Bandwidth, consulting, e-commerce, hosting, and network building Phone: +1 (785) 865-5885 Lawrence and [inter]national Phone: +1 (316) 794-8922 Wichita ~ Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 11:23:58 + (GMT) From: A Trap [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Please ignore this portion of my mail signature. These last few lines are a trap for address-harvesting spambots. Do NOT send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], or you are likely to be blocked.
Re: sprint passes uu?
On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Brian wrote: The interesting part of that to me is that the total number of prefixes in a full feed is in the low 100,000 range, so this still represents a very large percentage of the entire prefix pie. x.x.x.x 4 1239 2396636 438162 6144276100 9w3d47637 x.x.x.x 4 701 3768775 499186 6144276100 1w5d45410 It's hard to know how large a percentage though without knowing how many Sprint customers are also UU customers. i.e. The combination of Sprint and UU customer routes could still be just 47637 prefixes, though I'm sure it's somewhere between that and 47637+45410. It's certainly not 47637+45410, which would falsely suggest that together Sprint and UU have roughly 80% of the internet as customers. -- Jon Lewis *[EMAIL PROTECTED]*| I route System Administrator| therefore you are Atlantic Net| _ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_
Re: sprint passes uu?
UUNET isn't just AS 701-- it also includes 702, 703, and a large set of other ASes around the globe. ...and number of announcements isn't a particularly useful yardstick for measuring the percentage of the Internet any given entity operates. - jsb On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Richard A Steenbergen wrote: I don't know if anyone cares or is keeping track, but it seems that Sprint has now passed UU in number of customer routes (or at least, routes sent to peers). -- Jeff Barrows, President Firefly Networks http://FireflyNetworks.net +1 703 287 4221 Voice +1 703 288 4003 Facsimile An Advanced Internet Engineering Professional Services Organization
Re: sprint passes uu?
On Tue, 15 Oct 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Brian wrote: It's hard to know how large a percentage though without knowing how many Sprint customers are also UU customers. i.e. The combination of Sprint and UU customer routes could still be just 47637 prefixes, though I'm sure it's somewhere between that and 47637+45410. It's certainly not 47637+45410, which would falsely suggest that together Sprint and UU have roughly 80% of the internet as customers. Roughly 34% of the announced UUNET routes are announced by Sprint also. But as others have indicated, this doesn't mean that much on it's own. It just means they announce a lot of prefixes, and a big chunk of it both are announcing. /nco
Re: sprint passes uu?
On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 07:25:15PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's hard to know how large a percentage though without knowing how many Sprint customers are also UU customers. i.e. The combination of Sprint and UU customer routes could still be just 47637 prefixes, though I'm sure it's somewhere between that and 47637+45410. It's certainly not 47637+45410, which would falsely suggest that together Sprint and UU have roughly 80% of the internet as customers. Well, just by checking the big providers off the top of my head, I come up with: ASN Routes Common Name -- --- 1239 47711 Sprint 701 45429 UU 3561 23205 CW 7018 23154 ATT 120231 BBN/Genuity 209 17082 Qwest 3356 12587 Level 3 3549 12175 GBLX 6453 10403 Teleglobe 2914 8791 Verio 6461 8089 MFN/AboveNet 4200 7506 Aleron/Agis 1299 6773 Telia 5511 4261 OpenTransit 4637 4066 Reach 16631 2067 Cogent 2828 1842 XO 4006 1727 NetRail/Cogent - 256984 Which of course ignores many dozens of 1-2k route providers. Now, of course number of routes has absolutily nothing to do with amount of traffic (ex: AOL, which anounces 400 some routes (and a lot of those are RoadRunner) but is one of if not the single the most important sink of traffic in the world), but it's interesting nevertheless. -- Richard A Steenbergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)
Re: sprint passes uu?
On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 08:10:16PM -0400, Jeff Barrows wrote: UUNET isn't just AS 701-- it also includes 702, 703, and a large set of other ASes around the globe. 702 and 703 routes were included in that number. -- Richard A Steenbergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)
