At 10:02 AM -0400 8/21/02, Stefan Jeglinski imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding: >>It doesn't look like the janitors at CAIS (all that are left after >>their bankruptcy and subsequent asset acquisition, according to >>rumor...) have managed to get the block you are in sub-registered >>to NAS. NAS is likely not to be really focused on getting that >>detail handled, given their own bankruptcy. > >Yeah, ain't it fun? And before NAS and CAIS, we were with PSINET. >I'm waiting to be transitioned to our 4th ISP, which will likely >also go bankrupt...
In 1993 I did a business analysis for my main client, then the largest pay BBS/online service in St. Louis. I said that there was no hope of serious profitability in the ISP business, and so I was not really interested in a 'piece of the action' in lieu of cold hard cash for services. It turns out that I was right, although I am still kicking myself for missing the fact that a lot of people who turned little online services into middling ISP's managed to sell them for very nice prices before folks like Verio, Earthlink, Worldcom, and AOL noticed that they were buying up a large collection of cash sinks. But I digress... >>As to the issue of how to determine that, a whois query on any ARIN >>IP address at ARIN will kick out the whole hierarchy of registered >>blocks. For example, 66.73.230.190 returns my name (and some >>address SBC uses for all their customer sub-registrations) on my >>/29 and Ameritech's name on the enclosing /15. Your address just >>returns the CAIS block, indicating that there is no >>sub-registration. > >And I noticed that there was also no "enclosing" block for CAIS. >Does this mean they are (were) a "tier 1" ISP? I've become more >interested in figuring out how all this stuff works (who is >up/downstream from whom), hence my separate post about global >routing tables. There's something of a terminology quagmire here. Everyone with more than a single connection these days is calling themselves 'tier 1' because there's not a really solid definition that everyone seems to accept. My understanding of that term is that it applies to entities running defaultless routers at multiple exchange points and not purchasing IP transit from any other provider. In other words, a network with such good connections that other big networks find it advantageous to 'peer' with them instead of trying to make them transit customers. CAIS never qualified as that. CAIS, like any largish ISP with multiple transit providers and some peering, had their own IP space assigned from ARIN, making it possible for them to operate as an 'autonomous system' (AS) in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) arena and so route their packets over the best available connections at any given moment. To get your own address space from ARIN and an AS number assigned, you need only convince them that you need the addresses and have more than one upstream provider. The convincing need not be fact-based, as has been demonstrated by a couple of spammers who have fraudulently obtained AS numbers and big IP space at times when they have had nothing more than dialup access. -- Bill Cole [EMAIL PROTECTED] ############################################################# This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the INDEX mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
