KB, it looks like I haven't been too clear, and if that's the case, apologies are in order.
I'm pretty sure that nothing that was stated by either myself or anyone else in the foregoing discussions was intended to suggest that ATHM's backbone was being "corrupted." On the contrary.
What ATHM has done along with T was to provide a highly viable, well-engineered facility for their own internal use.
This stipulation, i.e., "for their own internal use," was what we were discussing, as opposed to its being a shared facility for use by other ISPs in a transiting sense. This is not a qualitative assessment, only a point of what appears to me to be the facts.
By excluding others from the interior of their VPN, it allows ATHM to more predictably adminster and plan the utilization of their resources. This is a plus, not a negative, from a network engineering perspective.
At the same time, it differentiates ATHM, in this regard, from other SPs who more openly share/peer/lease/donate their routing and backbone facilities on a routine basis. |
