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To: Jay Lowe who wrote (17522)	12/5/1999 9:35:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

If such sharing at the IP level only were the issue, then there would be no need for them to enter discussions involving the dominance of the MSOs at the franchise level. They would simply gateway upstream somewhere into the cloud. What the ISPs want, however, is access at the physical layer, they want the same thing that ATHM enjoys, their own connection to the user. At least that has been the case. Maybe one of them will read your post and change their mind. What you have done here is to highlight once again the area surrounding the head end that will need to be accessed by multiple players, so that the CM feeds reach their respective b-b clouds. This results in more redundant networking between the MSO locations and the larger 'net, in effect. Of course, T could 'offer' carriage on the 5 Gb/s backbone which they installed for ATHM, but probably only once adequate partitioning was assured, and at a price which the ISPs can probably beat with their own T1/T3 provisions. Likewise, the ISPs would need to either provide their own routers in this case, or use partitions on existing ones provided at the head ends or regional ATHM offices. Again, I tend to think that the ISPs would prefer to use their own, given the proprietary nature of account administration, policy administration, etc. I could be wrong about both the availability of these routers to them, and the fact that they would even consider it. Just speculating at this point. And as more than one person on these boards has mentioned, if there are any imminent takeouts pending for the near future, I wouldn't be surprised to see resource sharing taking place at this time, then, on a larger scale.