best effort has economic problems

Sun May 30 05:17:40 UTC 2004

On Sat, 29 May 2004, Eric Kuhnke wrote:

> 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.  :-)

12016 will only do OC48 speeds and the OC48 cards that used to be had at 
$3500-$5000 on eBay now is $10k+ and quickly drying up. Then there is the 
whole legal and support issue, if you need Cisco support and want to be 
legal, you can effectively double the above prices.

> 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.

At least in Sweden there is still plenty of unlit dark fiber than can be
had cheaply. It's not the fiber that'll cost you, it's the rent of
floorspace and power in the amplifier stations, plus the manpower OPEX of
keeping it running.

Still, at prices of $25-40 per meg per month, it's hard to produce 
new bandwidth even by buying gear on ebay and doing everything the cheap 
way. Let's say you average 1 gig of paying traffic per month on your OC48 
links, that'll only give you let's say $40k revenue per month. Not much to 
build an operation on.

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