best effort has economic problems

Mon May 31 20:06:00 UTC 2004

Mikael Abrahamsson writes:
> 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)

I don't think there's 10 GE WAN PHY for the Cisco 7600 yet.  It has
very cost-effective 10 GE *LAN* PHY (10.0 Gb/s, not SONET-compatible)
interfaces though, which I find even more interesting (see below).

> 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.

We find that the L1 equipment is getting much cheaper too, especially
in the 10 GE LAN PHY space.  Think DWDM XENPAKs (or XFPs), which go
70-100 kms and which can be multiplexed and amplified with pretty
affordable optical equipment.  If you're not interested in
carrier-class boxes, "traditional" WDM equipment can sometimes be
replaced with active parts that mostly look like GBICs, and passive
parts that look like funny cables...

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