On 12/27/24 04:34, Mike Hammett wrote:

A few years back, every Tom, Dick, and Harry was touting MPLS or Carrier Ethernet NNIs with 10G ports everywhere. They still are. However, I rarely have seen that graduate to 100G ports and I don't think I've seen anyone talk about 400G ports.

Is the hardware not there, or is it more a case of the technology hasn't been deployed widely, so it'll only be seen at a limited number of locations? I'm assuming it's more of the latter as the bigger hardware I've been looking at touts those features and port sizes, but maybe there's some other unadvertised limitation.

There was enough of a gap between 10G trunks and <1G customer services, together with the relatively low cost of 10G hardware, that made it sensible to deploy 10G NNI's everywhere. But because most core links are 10G or N x 10G, selling a 10G, 20G, 30G or 40G EoMPLS service means you will struggle with a lot of ECMP chaos in the core, if going to 100G core links is nowhere near your budget cycle.

Moreover, if you want to deliver 10G or N x 10G EoMPLS services, 100G hardware is not as cheap now as 10G was when EoMPLS was all the rage. In such cases, a provider will find it easier to deliver your 10G or N x 10G as an EoDWDM service.

There isn't much of a gap between 100G and 400G (only 4X vs. 10X for 1G-to-10G and 10G-to-100G). So trying to deliver a, say, 100G or N x 100G EoMPLS service means you will need to build multiple 400G links (either as N x 100G or N x 400G, depending on your budget), or even start to consider 800G hardware.

When you look at the cost of 100G, 400G and 800G routers/switches vs. DWDM gear, you'd be mad to try to deliver EoMPLS services of that magnitude on your IP/MPLS network.

My suspicion is that as operators start to get closer to building 100G-and-beyond core links on a regular basis, they will slowly migrate away from EoMPLS to EoDWDM for their point-to-point circuits.

Mark.