BARRnet meeting
Pine Hall, Stanford
24 March 93
John Gilmore, Pozar, Tom Jennings

Gilmore covered the major parts of the talk with Yount/BARRnet well.
I'll just fill in with my impressions and maybe additional details.


Met with Bill Yount (sp) and (name). We told him of our troubles with
Alternet, ie. OK to add on low-speed members but not 56K. The
"reselling IP" issue. Mapped our presence in the Bay Area with circles
and dots. The usual. Told him hat basically, we want to find a provider
that is willing to sell us bandwidth to do with as we pleased. Outlined
our approach and methodology of support and development.

Signifigantly, we told him that basically we can only sign up the
smallish, 14.4K members, and that we had 56K, 256KB microwave, etc
waiting in the wings, that we cannot connect under our current scheme.

John told him that all this was seeminlgy possible under the WRITTEN agreement
with Alternet, but that the ACTUAL agreement was something else, when
push came to shove. Hence our shopping trip.

When we initially stated that we wanted pipe, and would take care of our
members' being clean and reliable, Yount said, oh no, an AFU members
site could really mess things up... BARRnet need to make sure they don't
make a mess... when I asked for a specific example, he hemmed and
hawed... I pressed it, and Bill flatly avoided the question, as if it
were `too obvious' or something. If it is, it is still utterly opaque to
me.

Bill proposed that TLG merge with/into BARRnet. This took us somewhat by
surprise, though he had hinted to Pozar that this was one of many
possibilities earlier. What John related to you (also below) is correct;
he talked about us as a resource for connecting low-speed members. He
was I think impressed and puzzled by our ability to connect and support
low-speed members well. 

It was not apparent what the advantage to TLG was. Yount said he'd
support our various "R&D" projects (Pozar's Gunnplexer links, 386BSD/NOS
routers, etc) (though made a face when we mentioned we wanted to give
that away). I think the biggest "advantage" to us is that whatever deal
we'd make would include connecting up our in-the-wings potential
members, but I'm guessing. He said he'd "hand us" routers and such to
connect new members -- which would basically be BARRnet members. It was
unspecified but implied that we'd handle connecting up some certain
class of members, presumably low-speed ones. We simply didn't get to
that level of detail.

When it became obvious that we wouldn't simply be able to buy pipe and
lay in members as we see fit, John pointed out that this "deal" is in
essence no different than the one we have. This is the point where Yount
dumped to us the ANS deal whereby they have arranged to pay X$ to ANS to
ship 56K max to NSFnet. He also said that they're really not interested
in us assholes who actually want to USE our "56K pipe"; I admitted to
him MY background (in FidoLand we squeeze a pipe for all it's worth,
even going so far as to change all our ssoftware) and hen he waxed
poetic about how all the "other" IP carriers (though we are truly being
"serviced" in a way we find unpleasant I prefer to call them this
instead) did their arithmetic by taking (big pipe / 56K == #buckets $$$)
and BARRnet did slightly more agressive calcs; they assumed more growth
than the others.

Somewhere in here Pozar mentioned that we'd sorta like to connect our
member subnets, full-time SLIP, for $50/month. Bill looked greyish.

The most interesting part gets a bit hard to remember, because it went
in circles, as we tried to pin them on "will you simply resell us IP
bandwidth to do with as we please" and Bil Yount kept dragging up
another option -- "Level 2 Service Provider", etc etc.  

We discussed the AUP problem of routing "commercial" traffic through
NSFnet and such. Bill pointed out (new to me, anyways) the specifics:
it's OK to move "commercial" traffic iff both ends desire it and at
least one of them is "R&E". eg. Stanford can discuss anything with HP. 


BARRnet is going to split off from Stanford, incorporating, Nov93 I
think. So he told us. I think he told us not to tell anyone. So don't,
unless you already knew this (or can make up a convincing story that you
already did.)

PS: Randy, Bill said he knew you, from INET93. 



				tomj


[ADDENDUM: I belive Bill said the ANS deal was, they have a 56K pipe to
ANS total, for the aggregate of commercial data for all their customers,
to ANS. If it goes over this, they (BARRnet) would have to renegotiate,
and Bill said they'd take 'em on it.]





Message-Id: <9303250749.AA26974@cygnus.com>
To: randy@psg.com (Randy Bush), gnu
Subject: Re: barrnet
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 93 23:49:07 -0800
From: gnu@cygnus.com

> What happened with BARRNET?  No, don't tell me, tell the list.

Too slimy and depressing to tell the list.  They wanted to co-opt us
as their "low speed" arm.  They have cut a deal with ANS which doesn't
let them have any commercial customers who offer more than 56kbits/sec
to the ANS gateway.  (This is so ANS can sign the high speed customers
up directly.)  If we are part of Barrnet then the limit doesn't apply.
They might consider simply signing us up as a "service provider", but
that has a mess of bullshit qualifications ($.5M in assets, UPS on
critical components, etc).  They don't let ordinary customers route
traffic for anyone else.

Lots more details, and we are still in negotiation, which is much of
why I don't want to tell the list, but my initial reaction is I'm glad
they aren't the only networking company in the Bay Area.  But who knows,
the rest could be worse, I'd hate to scotch any deal by leaking it to
toaster-list.  (Two TLG members are on toaster, and heard of our
Alter-cation through it before they heard it from us.  Who knows who
else is on the list, or is getting tidbits forwarded by some list member?
On stuff like this I go by the NYT rule:  If you don't mind seeing
it on the front page of the NY Times, don't post it to a mailing list.)

	John