[RndTbl] MUUG mirror site problems

[Bill Reid]

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