🚀 go-pugleaf

mjlevy@delete_this.interlog.com (Michael Levy) wrote:

>The ISP is in fact only offering a transportation system like the telcos
...snip
>Maybe iStar will have to only offer WWW surfing connections that are not
>cached on their machines!  IMO that is the next logical step they may have
>to take, making themselves a pipeline only.

Now there is a interesting business idea.  
1. Set up a high throughput news server in some friendly country (or
floating on a barge in the Atlantic).  
2. Connect up large dedicated links to each of the major Internet
backbones in each major center ... use an initial wireless hop if your
floating. :-)
3. Offer a wholesale news hosting services to any ISP who is afraid of
getting tossed in jail.  

Presto.  The ISP is *never* storing the news, it is only transporting
it.  Therefore the ISP is no more culpable than the telco who supplied
the ISP's T1 connection to the backbone. 

As an ISP I'd have to do a quick business case on the
economic/performance tradeoffs of local storage versus hauling my
customer's minute-by-minute news requests over the backbone.  For a
smallish ISP I'd guess that a full newsfeed is already more bandwidth
intensive that all the news traffic generated by its customers.
Furthermore, once you factor in lawyer fees I'm guessing that barge in
the Atlantic is looking pretty attractive.   :-)

Maybe I can get the government to give me a grant to set up off the
east coast.  Think of all the jobs I'll create plowing the fibre up to
my wireless station on the coast.  It may be illegal to catch fish,
but I can store lots of pictures of people catching fish and no one
can stop me!  Ha-ha! 

Jeff Brown