Coincidence...

Tue May 13 16:09:47 UTC 1997

bmanning at ISI.EDU writes:

> And its not clear there is enough
> capacity in the PSTN to carry all the bits about.  

The hard part is stringing fibre around, followed by
figuring out clever ways of lighting it up.

North America is Geographically Challenged in that respect
compared to the greater number of shorter rights-of-way
among large customer bases in other parts of the world.

For now there is some coasting going on in the U.S. and
Canada particular since the traffic crunch is mostly 
north-to-south.  However ultimately trunking east-to-west
will fill and that is a much harder bottleneck to widen,
and provides interesting opportunties to people deploying
things other than fibre in the U.S.   Of course, such
deployments strike me as unstable economically principally
for scaling and failure-avoidance-and-recovery reaosns
compared to modern fibre technology.

Of NANOG relevance, there are ample war stories of
weather-sunspot-and-bat-releated outages on high-bandwidth
alternatives to terrestrial paths.  *I* wouldn't use a
non-fibre (and ideally non-SONET) path where one were
avialable if losing connectivity (or alot of capacity)
when it stops working were an issue.

	Sean.