Comment by amazon_not | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amazon_not | Hacker News Reader

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> Because many customers don't actually want a dumb pipe.

Yes, they do. That's exactly what they want. A dumb pipe that transports their bits and nothing more.

I'm omitting your list about dumb pipes, as nothing you write has anything to do with dumb pipes and is all completely wrong.

> Personally, I'd like a dumb pipe only as far as the nearest major datacenter, and then quite a lot of smarts in that datacenter. I don't just want a raw connection to a major bandwidth provider, though.

Hate to disappoint you, but there are no smarts in any ISP datacenter. It's just a big router and some interconnects. Raw bandwidth is all you get, if you are lucky.

> See also the last paragraph of my previous reply: I'd be in favor of separating out the "dumb pipe" as a utility, and then having ISPs operate independently from that. I think that would solve the majority of the problems.

It's not that simple, there are a lot of implementation details that matter. Do you want local loop unbundling, bitstream access or only resale?

I think we have a serious problem of definitions (which goes back to what I said about this being not trivial to define): we're both saying the phrase "dumb pipe" and apparently meaning quite different things by it. Defining terms differently does not invalidate arguments, it just means we're talking past each other.

> Do you want local loop unbundling, bitstream access or only resale?

In an ideal world? A form of local loop unbundling, with a not-for-profit entity running/maintaining the local fiber, and umpteen ISPs readily available to handle termination and routing at the other end.

> I think we have a serious problem of definitions (which goes back to what I said about this being not trivial to define): we're both saying the phrase "dumb pipe" and apparently meaning quite different things by it.

Really? How many definitions are there?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_pipe http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html

> In an ideal world? A form of local loop unbundling, with a not-for-profit entity running/maintaining the local fiber, and umpteen ISPs readily available to handle termination and routing at the other end.

That's nice. Now you've either locked out small/unsophisticated ISPs/network users who can't or can't afford to light the fiber or increased cost and/or complexity by requiring an additional service provider on top of the dark fiber provider to provide bitstream, retail and other transport services. Also excellent choice for finger pointing when these two actors donit get along.

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