best effort has economic problems

Mikael Abrahamsson swmike at swm.pp.se
Sat May 29 21:47:04 UTC 2004


On Sat, 29 May 2004, Gordon Cook wrote:

> discussing.  We don't pretend that QoS is easy or any kind of mature 
> collection of technologies, but increasingly it looks as though the 

Tier 1 operators do not do "best effort" really, at least not in their
cores (and they have the SLAs to back it up). They buy hugely expensive
top notch gear (Cisco 12000 (and now CRS:s) and Junipers) to get the big
packet buffers, the fast reroutes and the full routing table lookups for
each packet to avoid the pitfalls of flow forwarding the cheaper platforms
have.

With the advent of 10GE WAN PHY (Force10, Foundry, Riverstone, Extreme
Networks, Cisco 7600) and full L3 lookup for each packet on their newer
platforms, we'll see very much cheaper L2/L3 equipment being able to take
advantage of existing OC192 infrastructure and that's where I think you'll
start to see the real "best effort" networks operating at. At least the
L2/L3 equipment will be much cheaper for the operators choosing this
equipment, at approx 1/5 the initial investment of similar capacity 12400
and Juniper equipment.

Now, how will this translate in cost compared to DWDM equipment and OPEX
part of the whole equation? Well, the bubble effect is still doing fine,
so I think we wont see any stability for yet another 2-3 years, I'll
definately give you that in your analysis. As long as there is equipment 
and unused installed capacity left from 2000-2001 out there, the price 
equation will be skewed compared to what it actually costs to replentish 
the capacity when you've sold it.

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




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