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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."
If Worldcom's failure were to bring a heightened sense of overall awareness about why you really DON'T want to put all your eggs in one basket, this may end up being a good thing.
If enough key (read: rich) players and businesses are seriously inconvenienced (read: lose a lot of revenue) because a key point of potential failure actually failed, then certain monopolies that have predatory practices might be trusted a lot less by default, with people seeking out alternatives "just in case".
There is currently so much excess high-speed telecom and datacom excess capacity that you could toss 50% of it and still have enough, though there may be localized disruptions. This is because of huge overbuilding during the dot-com boom.
If UUNet goes away, then were will the spammers turn? Right now they have UUNet which says 'not our problem because the spammer is our customer's customer.' What happens if UUNet is taken over by a reputable ISP that shuts down spammers and those that harbor them?
It would be better to re-nationalize the internet backbone, then to bail out those bastards at Worldcom. It was government controlled when only the military and universities could use the internet. I hope Milnet, formerly Arpanet, the part of it that is still there to keep our defense network up and running in the case of an enemy attack, is not part of what Worldcom could pull the plug on.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Fine, sez I. I'd rather stick rusted, lye-soaked icepicks through my eyeballs than get a premium service from these vultures. But dialup was slow, and one day a rep from Brooks Fiber came to my workplace wanting to talk about becoming our frame relay and Internet vendor. After we went through the basic Q and realized that they couldn't quite offer anything to beat our in-place solutions, I asked him if they offered a BRI product to my exchange. He called an engineer, and within a minute told me they did. I asked him about the rate. "$70 a month flat, no cap."
Without skipping a beat I asked him if he could bring a contract over later that day. He did, I signed, and four weeks later I had ISDN at my house. I paid zero dollars for engineering, buildout and installation, in spite of the fact that all this took place on Qwest copper and necessitated a repeater because the circuit was WAY over 18,000 feet. And four years later the only downtime I've ever had was due to that antiquated copper contracting in a cold snap...but because I was dealing with a CLEC I was able to get it fixed over Thanksgiving weekend.
Oh yeah, the irony part. Brooks got bought by MCI, which was subsequently gobbled by Worldcom. I don't like to think about what could happen now. It's like being a tiny mammal staring up at two dinosaurs who've been locked in mortal battle, and noticing that they're both dying of blood loss.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
NPR said WorldCom donated 7.5 Million dollars to both parties last election. That would make me believe there will be no bankruptcy of WorldCom. Get your checkbook out.
Remember a few years ago when AOL's subscriber base grew faster than its network capabilities, and they turned to MCI to save their ass?
From that, this is what I would suspect would happen:
1. WCOME will go bankrupt, and be forced to liquidize assets and sell off infrastructure.
2. AOL will buy the infrastructure, thus making their entire network in-house, without accumulating WCOME's debts and any liabililties.
3. AOL get even bigger. More pr0n, yay.
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WhirldClown may shut down entire sections of UUnyet if they can't find buyers soon. They'll break the system up into affordable chunks and sell off what they can. Some of it they'll shut down for good, to take the tax writeoff. Other sections will be shut down because they can't afford the experienced people any more. Big reseller companies haven't been paying their bills, some for almost a year.
/. may just disappear for hours each day, and ISPs are going to have to raise rates if they want redundant routes to avoid the worst congestion. The two biggest european carriers are in trouble, and redundancy is about to become very expensive.
Lately there have been lots of problems in the European networks, with large numbers of BGP4 routes going missing because of people switching away from ebone. The ebone guys have done a great job with too few experts, but slowly entropy and bit rot is causing problems. The dropped or blackholed or null-routed routes mean that major areas can't see each other for hours on end, until the BGP routes stabilize and find new routes. And those new routes tend to quickly saturate with traffic, leading to lots of lost packets and huge lags.
There is a lot of excess capacity, but none of it is being used for the moment. Putting expensive kit on the ends of the fibres and hiring expensive guys to run it just can't be done in this economy. So the internet isn't going to be as reliable as we've been used to, sites like
Thats the inevetable result of this shakeout, more expensive internet for everyone, and lower reliability for a while. A few years down the road, it will get cheap and reliable again, but that will take some effort.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
this is a map of AS paths & peering relationships on the internet. take a close look at the center.
I despise all of this fearmongering over 'what would we do' if Microsoft, or Worldcom, or Enron, or AOL/TW were to fall. Even if it's justified, who's fault is that? Who let them get so big and unobstructed that they could hold an entire economy hostage? My opinion is that, in a free market system, "You need us," is not a viable solution to a failing business. Whether it's an airline or a telecom, let'em crumble. They all seem eager to be left alone, free to 'innovate' or 'compete' until innovation and competition reveals them to be a failure, and then they're newly born socialists begging for government cheese because they're existence is supposedly good for 'the people'.
And how much bandwidth is really available? And how much is really not being used? With the ISPs raising prices, it's worth asking. Could we just soak up half of the bandwidth to the U.S. dissapearing? If so, the prices are being raised because of speculation on the part of the providers a year or two ago, and not because "abuse" is hurting the service. Just something to think about.
Incase it escaped anyone's radar Worldcom owns OzEmail, which according to an IT news website is ranked the No. 2 Australian ISP after Telstra. This most likely means that Worldcom will have to sell off OzEmail to recover some assets for it's creditors, but this is not all bad because it means it's original owners could buy it back for far cheaper than they sold it for. There is some more information at this link and this link.
aus.music.scrapbook
About forty years ago, it looked like Lockheed was going to go bankrupt. The stock fell from $60 to $3, which was below par (i.e. breaking up the company and selling off the assets would have recovered more money than the stock was selling for). The problem was that Lockheed wasn't just a defense contractor, it was the defense contractor, and during the height of the cold war, to boot. They couldn't be allowed to go bankrupt.
So the government bailed them out.
Then, some years later, there was a little problem at a generating plant owned by General Public Utilities (GPU). You might not have heard of GPU but you've heard of the plant: Three Mile Island. GPU stock took a hit, as you might imagine. In fact it looked like it might go broke. The problem was that it was a utility, which means it was a monopoly. If it went broke the lights went out over a fair stretch of countryside. That couldn't happen.
So the government bailed them out.
Now, my father saw both of those coming. He bought Lockheed stock at fire-sale prices because he knew that they couldn't be allowed to go broke. He cried because he couldn't afford more. He made out like a bandit.
When GPU started to go under, he bought all the GPU stock he could. And this time, he could afford more. He made out like a bandit. So well, in fact, that he assured himself a comfortable retirement. He's quite conservative, and told me ruefully, "I always preached the values of thrift and economy. Now I'm comfortable in my old age, but it isn't due to any of that. Hmph."
Then the Seattle public utility, through a boring series of blunders, started to go broke. They couldn't be allowed to go broke, for the same reasons that GPU couldn't and Lockheed couldn't.
So the government...said "Hey! Wait just a darn minute here!" And didn't bail them out.
And they went broke. And the lights stayed on.
Ditto when California started having rolling blackouts. Big raspberries from the Fed, because the Shrub knows California wouldn't vote for him if he was rolling out the red carpet in front of Jesus Christ for the Second Coming. Much stick-waving, stunningly bad contracting, and shouting, but the lights came back on and stayed that way.
The days of government bailouts are over.