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EBone/KPNQwest Network Shutting Down
reginald.barclay writes "As KPNQwest has filed for bankruptcy some time ago, also EBone, which they aquired some months ago, goes down the drain. Together, these two companies carried betwenn 1/3 and 1/2 of European IP Traffic (and, in the case of KPNQwest, an unknown portion of voice). Employees at Ebone were laid off last week and told to abandon their NOC. But instead of getting drunk and over with it, they occupied their former workplace. Now even their time is running out, and one of Europes oldest backbone carriers will probably be shut down today, at 1700 CET. I wonder how many of their customers (mostly ISPs and VBCs themselves) have managed to run to the competition in time. Nevertheless, I expect the routing in large parts of Europe to be very interesting (in the chinese sense, of course) over the coming weekend and early next week." Update: 06/14 18:02 GMT by M : Apparently KPNQwest's creditors have agreed to pay to keep the place going until the end of June.
The next time someone is talking on slashdot about how mergers are natural in the telecom industry, and telecom companies that lock down entire markets until they are local monopolies in some cities are Just Trying to Make a Living, and the government has no right to dictate that a telecom company be "nice" to their competitors, and there's absolutely no harm in megamerger after megamerger followed by competitors being disallowed from leasing space on the local telecom equipment..
I'm going to link this article.
And then i'm going to scream something incoherent along the lines of "BAD AYNDROID!! BAD!! BAD!! SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE BAD!! MONOCULTURE BAD!!, and then curl up in a little ball and cry because no-one really cares.
I'm sitting in an office in Brussels, it will be interesting to see how stopping this backbone affects the Internet in Europe. The BBD reported that Ebone carries 25%, their website reports 50%, of traffic in Europe.
Anyone tried this kind of nuclear blast on th Internet before?
My blog
For better or worse, a couple large networking companies in my aread have gone out business recent, one of whom is our upstream provider. Unlinke what sounds like may happen in this case, we had zero downtime. Another company bought the network for pennies on the dollar. Only way we can tell anything changes is we havn't gotten a bill for two months because the new company doesn't have their act together in that regard yet.
Similar thing happened with the major compition to Verizon. They went out of business, and to the best of my knowledge their customers who have not left (many did), have not lost service, although that whole fiasco is not finished.
Anyway, chances are, another large networking company will buy the network for almost nothing, and pick up where the existing company left off...just with much lower capital investments, which may lead to lower prices.
I for one believe things like this are a mixed blessing, and in some cases needed to lower the cost structure for providing these services. Kinda like a built in cost correction.
I may be way off base with this, but that's what I think base on what I have seen locally.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Or maybe they're frantically emailing out their resumes before the T1 dies.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
quote: "According to information gathered by the group, the three executives awarded themselves ten-fold salary and bonus increases in May 2001, which were kept secret till the day after the sale of GTS's assets was announced. The three received a total of $21m (£14.7m) in 2001, a sum that amounted to 52 percent of the stock value of the company at the time, said Kaplan. By comparison, Enron's much criticized "loyalty bonuses" only amounted to a few percent of its value."
No Zen is good zen
The Ebone network hasn't been shut down. I'm a pround Ebone customer, and our network is properly wor
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I dunno, I think there should be a government bailout of something like this.
No. No. No.
If the infrastructure is really that critical (like a country's highway system is), then the government should nationalize the backbone and make it available to competing ISPs under identical terms (i.e. actually allow competition and prevent vertical monopolies leveraged from physical monopolies over last mile cable and critical backbone links from forming).
If it isn't that important, then they should simply stand aside and let these companies go belly up, with all the consiquences that entails.
In no way should an existing, unsuccessful commercial enterprise be propped up by government: either the free market works, or there is no free market (read: monopoly), in which case the underlying structural cause of the monopoly (if any, in this case perhaps the copper, esp. if last-mile copper is involved) should be nationalized, and the market opened up so it can operate freely, with competition.
Bailouts are the worst of both possible worlds: government intervention and expenditure of public funds AND private corporate control with no public accountability (beyond their stockholders, if they happen to be traded publicly).
When Northpoint went under with no warning it sucked (we were off the net for 2 days due to that fiasco, and NSI didn't fix our DNS for 10 days), but even there a government bailout would have been wrong.
Nationalizing Ameritech's last mile of copper, so that Ameritech wouldn't be able to maliciously leverage that monopoly to drive competing DSL providers like Northpoint out of business, on the other hand, would have been a reasonable response. Unfortunately the ayndroids of the far right have managed to convince a large percentage of people that free enterprise is a panacea in all contexts and the only good governance is no governance. Nonsense, of course, as anyone can see (just try applying that logic to public highways and try to imagine the economic impact of Road Monopolies), but it is a widespread and in many respects crippling meme that has infected much of America.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy