Thanks, Rupert. It's interesting to watch these outfits mutate. They come on line in one guise, but over time in order to meet the demands of competitive pressures they begin to inch into territories that were earlier foreign to them, or not in their original charter. Sometimes as custom arrangements, sometimes simply as "one offs."
I've seen some web home pages change their content wrt services and products within short periods of time reflecting these phenomena. In some ways I'm reminded of Teleport's original claim that they would never compete with their IXC customers. Imagine.
The Palo Alto exchange which became above.net, which was later bought by MFNX, once made a statement that they would never compete with their ISP and Content Provider customers, providing them with a neutral setting for resourece sharing, peering and exchange. They've keep their promise to the larger extent, I'm told, by not offering their services to end user organizations.
I'll need to re-examine GBIX. A recent visit to their NY City superpop location in Chinatown by a couple of my staff led me to believe that they, too, were providing colo and other neutral services.
There are other outfits, too, some trading publicly. One is in Austin TX called Apirian <APRN> (was MSI Holdings) who have been expanding their presence nationwide. They, and others, seem to have changed their charter over time to reflect shifting du jourisms in the SP world. It's especially difficult to validate what I've just stated if they change their names at the same time ;-)
FAC |
