The future of transport in the metro area

Sun Aug 4 08:07:48 UTC 2019

A friend of mine whom I rely upon took it upon himself to put my question
to a reliable contact of his. In the hope of adding some value to this
thread, I'm reproducing this exchange with their names removed, in
descending chronological order (latest first, earliest last).

Academic in the US:It’s almost all packet over OTN. SONET has been on its
way out (at least in what I’ve seen) since the mid 2000’s. The last SONET I
touched was like 2008, and that was to tear it out and replace it with
Ethernet over OTN.

My contact: What you’re seeing pretty much matches what I’m seeing (from
the outside). What I think Etienne is wondering is “how is that magic sauce
delivered inside the SP network” - are they still using SONET/SDH, did they
move to OTN, or is it pure packet-switched technology.  The few networks I
saw from the inside recently were all using packet-based technology (mostly
MPLS) over lambdas. Would you have more data points?

Academic in the US: Almost everything I have seen in the US and parts of
western Europe are either spectrum sharing (rare, but definitely a thing),
wavelength as a managed service, or - more commonly - "managed ethernet"
where the product is basically a L2 managed path with a hard bandwidth cap.
This is far more common, especially in metro areas as it's basically part
of pretty much all of the MetroE platforms. In the US, MPLS is still pretty
heavy but MPLS-SR is likely going to take over that space. Carriers are
selling waves at a premium, they'd much rather oversell a frame service.

On Sun, Aug 4, 2019 at 9:28 AM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> wrote:

>
>
> On 4/Aug/19 02:16, Brandon Martin wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > Those are definitely longer distances than I was inquiring about.  I
> > was asking for distances in the range of more like 100km.
>
> For shorter runs, I think it's cheaper to find dark fibre and do
> something yourself.
>
> Mark.
>

-- 
Ing. Etienne-Victor Depasquale
Assistant Lecturer
Department of Communications & Computer Engineering
Faculty of Information & Communication Technology
University of Malta
Web. https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/etiennedepasquale
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