Broadband initiatives - impact to your network?

Tue Jun 29 00:27:22 UTC 2010

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 6:26 PM, Jonathan Feldman <jf at feldman.org> wrote:

> I don't agree with you, Christopher, that the broadband plan won't affect
> corporate users.  I know that this list _mostly_ consists of operators, but

(there are a fair number of consumer network operations folks on nanog
as well...)

There have been plans to offer 'business' connectivity (replacing
T1/T3 last-mile type things) from the likes of Verizon (FiOS) for some
time. To date you can't (and they don't seem to have plans really) get
a last-mile tail on FiOS with BGP for routing information (like for a
redundant connection setup, or for alternate provider paths: FiOS
50mbps link from VZ + 45mbps Ds3 from ATT using BGP to manage your
redundancy needs). I don't know that you could not do the same on
Comcast or Cox's deployments at this time, maybe someone from these
alternatives have already spoken up privately on the matter.

> I've gotten some offline responses to my initial query that seem to indicate
> that enterprise users utilize SOHO (consumer grade, but with higher speeds)

Sure, lots of folks use 'consumer grade' links for out-sites, that
dish on top of the Mobil station being the cannonical example. These
out-sites don't generally have the data concentration of the main
office, nor the bandwidth needs, nor the redundancy/resiliency needs.

 Using a SOHO/Consumer link in the right place is a fine solution,
using it at your core site, not so fine...

> for various branch office needs.  Also, when a technology gets
> "consumerized" it tends to create interesting effects in terms of features
> and price points.

Still waiting for that on the FiOS space or the Comcast space (where's
my 100mbps cable/FiOS link with BGP for redundancy?).

I CAN get a 50mbps bidirectional FiOS link with static ip addresses
(that I have to pay for the 'privilege' of having) but I can NOT use
my own ip space, nor can I use a routing protocol to tell VZ or the
rest of the world to prefer my alternate link to get to my office.
That's suboptimal, and not 'business class' service.

> Think of it this way: where would corporate mobile phones be without the
> consumer effect?  We'd still be carrying them around in bags and only
> corporate officers would have them.

I'm not sure that the corporate smartphone usage was driven by
consumers, it seems (to me) to be the other way around actually... I'm
not a mobile-maven so who knows :)

-Chris

>
> I appreciate everyone's response!
>
> On Jun 28, 2010, at 5:46 PM, Christopher Morrow wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 9:03 AM, Jonathan Feldman <jf at feldman.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm one of the reporters who covers broadband and cloud computing for
>>> InformationWeek magazine (www.informationweek.com), and it's interesting
>>> to
>>> me that one of the issues with cloud adoption has to do with the limited
>>> pipe networks available in this country. For example, it's not feasible
>>> to
>>> do a massive data load through the networks that are currently available
>>> --
>>> you need to FedEx a hard drive to Amazon.  Holy cow, it's SneakerNet for
>>> the
>>> 21st Century!
>>
>> is this a 'this country' bandwidth problem or the problem that moving
>> 10tb of 'corporate data' in a 'secure fashion' from 'office' to
>> 'cloud' really isn't a simple task? and that cutting a DB over at a
>> point in time 'next tuesday!' is far easier done  by shipping a
>> point-in-time copy of the DB via sata-drive than 'holy cow copy this
>> over the corp ds3, while we make sure not to kill it for mail/web/etc
>> other corporate normal uses' ?
>>
>> The broadband plan stuff mostly covers consumers, not enterprises,
>> most of the (amazon as the example here) cloud folks offer
>> disk-delivery options for businesses.
>>
>> you seem to be comparing apples to oranges, no?
>>
>> -chris
>
>