links on the blink (fwd)

Thu Nov 9 06:38:06 UTC 1995

Dennis Ferguson <dennis at Ipsilon.COM> wrote:

>Yet not only
>can you not buy OC-12 routers off the shelf, or anywhere else, you can't
>even buy honest OC-3 routers at this point (I will avoid progressing into
>a rant on how the bizillions invested in ATM development to produce very
>little of practical use so far might have been better spent...).

That's funny to hear from somebody from Ipsilon :)  Granted, ATM
as is is quite useless.  I have serious doubts that it can be made
useful at all (as anything but a stupid framing protocol).

The router capacity is not the only problem, there's also the long-haul
capacity problem.  Yes, fibers are not ribbon, and you can put only as
many bits in them.  So the current games with ATM (throw away 30% of
user data capacity) and dual-ring SONET (throw away another 50%) as
opposed to native packet switching is not even a silliness, it's
plain old stupidity.

>And I would suggest that if you were, say, a big phone company, and you
>actually understood...

You gotta be kidding.  The whole corporate culture in telcos is built
around single-digit growth rates, when next year's provisioning is
done by tweaking previous year's figures, and being a droid is
rewarded, while doing something new is regarded as pain in the neck.

>So we've got routing problems front and center, here and there, with
>bandwidth problems creeping up behind.  We've got some companies with
>relatively deep pockets, or which are flush with IPO money, which would
>very probably spend to fix it if they could, if only to avoid being
>featured on the 10 o'clock news when disasters occur, except there doesn't
>seem to be anything to spend the money on which is clearly going to fix
>anything.

Tried to find venture capital for a backbone router company recently?
On reasonable terms?

There is hardware which physically can route *terabits per second*.
It is there.  It is real wires and real silicon, not fancy projects.
The problem is that there are very few people with a clue on how to
make the router software for the boxes, and the management is intent
on blessing Americans by saving them trip to the next corner's Blockbuster.
No, popcorn on demand is not provided, so you still have to haul your
<optional obscenity> off the couch.

>I don't think this is a happy state to be in, in fact it sucks,
>but I don't think it is correct to attribute this state to counter-productive
>profit motives.

Never attribute to maliciousness that which could adequately be
explained by stupidity.

>I think we're victims of our having own success creep up
>to and pass the technology when we weren't paying close enough attention,
>and the only thing left to do seems to be to try to play catch-up from
>a position of increasing disadvantage.

No.  The screaming about traffic explosion was high for the last
few years, and it generally fell on deaf ears.  There's a perception
among those who has the money that ATM will come and fix everything
by magic, so there's no point in building routers.  Maybe that's our
fault that we allowed the charlatans to push their snake oil to those
who don't know better.

My personal course in that is to keep playing with my toys and wait
till the fun begins.  Shouldn't be long.  The worse, the better.

--vadim
(NOT a Sprint employee, just using old mailbox).