best effort has economic problems

Sat May 29 22:36:39 UTC 2004

> 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.

When 12016s are on ebay for $12,000, even a low budget "tier 3" can 
afford proper routing gear...  It's not as if the Internet is still 
powered by 7507s!  (Well, a large part still is.  :-)

> Now, how will this translate in cost compared to DWDM equipment and OPEX
> part of the whole equation? 

I am starting to see some interesting long-distance 2.5Gbps CWDM gear 
offered by European manufacturers, with 70km and 100km distance ratings. 
  This stuff sells for a fraction of the price of equivalent 
Nortel/Ciena/Cisco ONS gear.  Lots of optics companies are making 70km 
rated SFPs in 8 or 16 wavelengths now.  So far it only runs at OC-48 
speeds, but 10Gbps will be coming soon.