Tactic 12 - Deploy Trial Gear into Operational Environment
One ISP deployed trial “loaner” gear into its production network. In this way the ISP leveraged free equipment, free technical support, and free delivery by an enthusiastic sales person.
Summary
As we have seen, there are many ways to optimize the purchase of commodity Internet Transit. As a reminder, these tactics are not necessarily ones that I recommend — they are useful to illustrate the Internet Transit paradigm and some of the market dynamics at play. The twelve tactics covered in this chapter:
- Optimal Internet Transit — commit early to the next higher commit level
- Gaming the 95th Percentile — orchestrate traffic across many ISPs
- Multi-Homing for performance and economic benefits
- Renegotiating Multi-Year Contracts every year
- Playing the Market to leverage information asymmetry
- Resell Transit to allow entry into a higher commit and lower price point
- Secret Sauce Transit for additional routing controls based on performance and cost
- Building into a Cheap Internet Region to leverage wide market disparity
- Internet Transit Troughs, which can be filled with no cost
- Capturing Content and Access Customers to allow feeding from a two-sided market
- Short-term Transit to participate in the dropping transit market without commitments
- Deploying Trial Gear into Production to minimize the cost of operating a network