IP over SONET considered harmful?

Sat Mar 21 14:32:32 UTC 1998

| Native IP over fiber is not a religion; it's a solid engineering.

I'm not totally convinced of this yet, because of the useful
O&M and restoration facilities SDH/SONET buys you now.

You need something underneath IP to do the sort of Lothberg
restorations I think you saw explained at the last NANOG meeting.

SDH/SONET is also a really keen way of sharing a network
among IP and other things on the wide-area side, and 
an even keener way of having access to relatively low-speed
customer data on the more local side.

I agree with you that there is alot of unnecessary overhead
in SDH/SONET, but there is also alot of what seems now to
be necessary overhead, too.  I do, however, expect heavy
experimentation involving radical simplification of on-fibre
framing for point-to-point paths dedicated exclusively to IP.

	Sean.