IP over SONET considered harmful?

Mon Mar 23 00:27:06 UTC 1998

At 06:32 AM 3/21/98 -0800, Sean M. Doran wrote:
>| Native IP over fiber is not a religion; it's a solid engineering.
>snip<

>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.

Both in US and In Japan, SONET/SDH systems are used to deliver such non-IP
traffic as CATV/Video over the same physical facilities as IP traffic. 

Indeed, I can walk you into a top-rated commercial television station using
a large Unix box with six ATM-over-SONET interfaces to drive video
broadcast streams to the stations' live broadcast to millions of viewers.
The same interfaces also transport TCP-IP application control data between
Unix  and the various off-line editing systems and the graphic development
engines (MAC/W'95).

You should not think that the prospect of internet based viewers are
outside the planning horizion of commercial broadcast industry, even if
that industry consists of predominately time critical (non-IP traffic)
today.  

Some major players in this industry agree that the mixture of SONET/SDH
with both IP and ATM traffic is "really keen".

..mike..