IP and Optical domains?

Sat Jun 18 22:00:42 UTC 2016

On Sun, 19 Jun 2016, Glen Kent wrote:

> Can somebody shed more light on what it means to say that the IP and 
> optical layers are run as independent kingdoms and why do ISPs need to 
> over-provision?

You have a group that runs fiber+dwdm+sonet(or SDH). You have another 
group that runs IP. When the IP guys ask "please tell us how the optical 
network is designed, and can we coordinate how they're built and btw, we 
want to put DWDM optics in our routers", the answer from the 
fiber+dwdm+sonet group is "no, but we can help you with transport using 
our transponders, please just order circuits, just give us addresses for 
each end and we'll take care of things, don't you worry your little IP 
engineer brain how things are transported long distance".

I believe this is still the case at a lot of ISPs. Not all, hopefully not 
even most, but I'm sure there are some.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se