Hi Shane On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Shane Cole wrote:
Why send traffic where it doesn't need to go? Does CNHL have the resource (in Simon Blake perhaps) to manage it?
I'm equal partner in Katipo Communications, for all intents and purposes selfemployed - if Citylink are happy to contract me to look after WIX, I'm really keen to do so.
What sort of charge would be levied on customers in addition to what they currently pay?
That's a matter for discussion, both within Citylink and publicly, I guess, and I can't speak for what Citylink will attempt to charge. However, I can provide some background. About a year ago, Citylink contracted a local consulting company to do a study on whether a WIX would be a viable business opportunity for CNHL. That report concluded that this was the case, and reinforced my arguement that improved network management (a WIX) was necessary for Citylink to ensure that the ethernet network scaled to match demand. Having said that, they made some assumptions that have since proved to be invalid: a) the WIX would only be of interest to ISP's, and thus the maximum number of organisations contributing to WIX would be perhaps 10 or 12. b) we'd need a couple of big Sparc servers to run the service. Since then, we've seen demand from a much wider range of organisations (and less from the ISP's, since they're using Merit), and the hardware costs have coalesced down to a bunch of PC's running open source software. So I would hope that the board pull back from the recommendations of the report, which (from memory) were $1000 to join the exchange, and $200/month, to something a bit lower.
Its my opinion that this should be part of the service fee that is paid to maintain a connection currently but then of course I'm not a shareholder in CNHL.
Nobody wants to pay more than they have to, but, OTOH, Citylink has to at least attempt to make a profit for it's shareholders.
If it is charged in addition to, then those people who might choose not to take part (due to it costing) in fact reduce the value of the service to those who do.
Sure, but to reverse that arguement, they lose the benefits of participating if they don't. I hope that Citylink don't set the price as a barrier to entry, because the more users there are the better it is for everybody, but I'm also realistic enough to realise that the current situation (each ISP running it's own IP network over Citylink) will continue into the forseeable future, and that there will be some proportion of Citylink users for whom improving their local connectivity is not an issue worthy of the extra cost (not just the WIX charges, but organising and setting up a BGP router). Ultimately, if a Citylink customer wants to setup the interface on their router such that they can only see their ISP, that's their choice. Cheers Si --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog