On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, Patrick W Gilmore wrote:
Unfortunately, I doubt any transit provider offering these prices will tell us if they are below cost. (Someone care to prove me wrong? :-)
Cisco 12400 OC192 cards are $225k listprice. You want to build a triangle with redundancy, ie 6 12400, 12 OC192 cards, and you want to write this off in three years. You have a good discount at 50% and you're a good provider who is sincere about redundancy and only load your links 50%. This means you've forked out approx $1.4M in linecards, you can load these at 50% ie 10gigabit/s of revenue-generating traffic (at best), that means approx $4 per megabit per month in just linecard costs to haul this between your three metro areas. No customer facing interfaces, no interconnect to other ISPs etc. I estimate that the router+LC cost for any GSR/juniper based network is $10/per megabit at least. Now, you probably need to get yourself a DWDM system or some DWDM capacity to run this network over, and you probably want to hire some qualified people to run it. Selling 10gig of internet at $30/megabit gives you a total revenue of $3.6M per year. I have a hard time to see the business case in this at current prices. Time to go back to the drawing board and find another way of doing this? Would you pay $10 more per megabit to buy this capacity from someone using 12000 than from someone using let's say 7600 routers? That's something people will have to start to figure out the way we're headed here. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se