Not sure if you remember me; I attended the meeting with John
Gilmore, Tim Pozar at your office about a month ago, about obtaining
network services for The Little Garden. A lot has changed since
then!

To make a long, circuitous story short: we are about to become a
full-fledged CIX member, with our own T1 to the CIX-West router in
Santa Clara. In addition, we're joining forces with another
'toasternet' based in Portland Oregon, called RAINnet, started by
my long-time friend Randy Bush and his co-conspirator John Klensin.
We will have a T1 between us. 'Rainy Garden Net' (RGnet.com) will
have 60+ sites scattered over three states.

With CIX membership we'll of course have direct access to CIX
members' connected networks. The last component is a connection to
NSFnet-connected networks and sites. We're persuing a couple of
options right now for this.

To the meat of the matter:

Would BARRnet be interested in working out an arrangement whereby
RGnet forwards it's non-CIX traffic to BARRnet, via a T1 link we
would install, and in partial exchange, allow BARRnet to forward
all traffic for RGnet via this direct link. We could also provide
you with a backup, redundant path to the CIX-West router via our
link, which would be one hop away. We estimate our non-CIX (eg.
NSFnet) traffic to be about 10% of our total. All of our inbound
traffic (to RGnet) will come via our CIX connection.

I'd like to reiterate that we will be forwarding the bulk of our
traffic via the CIX connection. All that would go through BARRnet
would be incidental packets for which we have not arranged a direct
connection.  This isn't the same "resell the data path to BARRnet"
issue as before, and we wouldn't exactly be a BARRnet Service
Provider either.

Thanks for your information and patience as we learn, the hard way,
how all of this is done :-)