At 2:41 PM 30/1/96, Andrew Partan wrote:

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The proper solution is for all these companies to form a consortium. The consortium would run the NAP and contract with multiple NSP's for service. In that case, the NSP's are not providing transit to non-customers because the consortium is the customer and every ISP who joins the consortium gets multihoming reliability outside the region.

Ah - we may have something that works - we have someone (the consortium) being paid (by these companies) to provide (or further purchase) transit.

My initial message may have been terse, but I was certainly not expecting the "deviant CIX" or "specialized NAP" or "Agregating CIDR Internet Detour" (ACID, (tm)) to provide world wide reachability for free. In fact, it is providing a service at a cost. The service is to provide reachability to smallish 192/27 single home or multihomed networks. It does so by aggregating several such networks into a larger, CIDR routable, 192/8 (or /10, or /15). The cost is indeed that the transit traffic goes through the ACID, consume bandwidth and other resources, and that these resources have to be payed for. In short, networks owners pay for not having to renumber; how much they are ready to pay depends on how expensive their renumbering will be. Paying can be done in many way, from the "consortium" which you suggest to some fees to a service company that operates the ACID. In fact, the major roadblock here is the intrisic monopoly -- at first sight, there can only be one ACID for a given aggregate. This may trigger all sorts of regulatory questions. Sharing of resource between consortium members or service customers may be done either the usual way (i.e. FIFO and random luck) or in a more organized way, e.g. using class based queuing. Christian Huitema