On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Petri Helenius wrote:
If your L3 topology is well aligned with your L1 topology, you usually end up with more hops. The less intermediate gear, like SONET you use but do L3 instead, the more L3 hops you have.
This is exactly what we do, we run L3 pretty much directly on the fiber with some OEO-repeaters in between, therefore we display much of our infrastructure in a traceroute. We can do a L2 hop instead, that will probably make things less efficient in some cases and will hide the underlying infrastructure, but will make customers happy. I don't like to do silly technical suboptimisations for cosmetical reasons.
B) you have more places for things to go wrong in both hardware and software.
This is specifically true for the hop-hiders using MPLS or other mostly pointless multihop recursive switching systems.
Quite true. I mean, either the equipment does an L2 or an L3 hop, either way it can go wrong. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se