Dan & Michele wrote:
rates .... is anyone else having difficulties in this area? btw: my ip is in the 142.161.179. address range for mts dsl. I traced the route from my machine to the muug site and it goes to toronto, then to calgary, then to wpg to get into shaw's bigpipe systems ... only 130ms RTT .. not too shabby for crossin' the country to get to a local inter-city site :-( .. when will these guys play nice together ...
Reminds me of the time a few years ago that I was campaigning for a Manitoba Internet Exchange. The costs were minimal since fiber from Shaw, GT and MTS were all present in a common location. Other Manitoba ISPs (Westman, Terago, SkyCable) were also interested. When MTS(50% of the traffic) refused to join the others lost interest. Certainly for customers it would have been a big win. Even for ISPs it is an advantage since they do not need to pay fees to haul the traffic outside the province. They would connect to the exchange at Gigabit bandwidth so latency would be very low.
The main argument that MTS puts forward is that they want to force companies with multiple Internet connections to get them from a single provider. As the use of VPNs and VoIP increases this is a big lost to the general Internet community. It is a confusing environment for the Internet customer. For example a couple of years ago when the UofM used MTS Dan would have had a much better connection.
I am on Shaw so my RTT to Muug is 12ms, 10 times better than what Dan is seeing. The sad part is that it is costing MTS more to give Dan a higher latency (ignoring the marketing issues :-) )
I had once mentioned to one of the CRTC directors that it would seem appropriate that local IXs should be mandated in every region. This would benefit customers and provide a more level playing field for smaller ISPs.
Oh well another good technical idea that gets squashed by marketing forces.
-- Bill