How Will WorldCom/UUNet Impact The Internet?

somewinner writes "CNN.com has an article discussing WordCom's impending failure and its possible impact on the internet. Given that WorldCom (via UUNet) handles 50% of US internet traffic, and a large percentage of traffic worldwide, some concern is certainly justifiable. However, the author of the article seems to think that nothing serious is going to happen."

Comments

The author is right

[Anonymous Coward]

When a company goes bankrupt for whatever reason, its assets do not vanish. They are property of the banks, and since banks are not in the business of running the Internet, they would sell the assets to the highest bidder[s]. This is true of an Internet company as it would be if a oil tanker company went bankrupt and the banks sold their ships to another company.

UUNet (Worldcom) has God knows how many routers, lines, Satellite equipment, and other things not in my vocabulary. Not only will they not "vanish," they will never be clicked off even temporarily as a result of this legal situation.

So relax.

Nothing's going to happen - here's why:

[seigniory]

1. Worldcom's telecom business has been losing money for a long time now. It's almost a lock that it will be sold off.

2. Ditto for a bunch of their other units - i.e. Skytel paging, etc.

3. The current CEO basically founded UUNet - it's his baby - it's not going away. The networks are owned by UUNet Worldcom - they're not going away either.

4. WCom's web hosting and data centers have been profitable for the past 8 quarters - plus, they are among the most well run DC's in the world. They're not going anywhere either.

Long story short - they're not going to get rid of anything making money - which is data and hosting. The worst that's going to happen is that you send your long distance checks to a different carrier. No worries, people.

Today's outage.

[macdaddy357]

There was a big internet outage where I work today,(Pomeroy) and our T1 lines are from Worldcom. Our MIS guys said it went beyond our company, and a lot of Worldcom's portion of the backbone was down. If our MIS wasn't just shifting the blame elsewhere, it was probably because a lot of the technicians who maintain the backbone have been laid off, just as the CNN article predicted. I suspect it is because Pomeroy has the best MIS department minimum wage will buy, but what if the whole backbone did go down?