At 06:32 AM 3/21/98 -0800, Sean M. Doran wrote:
| Native IP over fiber is not a religion; it's a solid engineering. snip<
SDH/SONET is also a really keen way of sharing a network among IP and other things on the wide-area side, and an even keener way of having access to relatively low-speed customer data on the more local side.
Both in US and In Japan, SONET/SDH systems are used to deliver such non-IP traffic as CATV/Video over the same physical facilities as IP traffic. Indeed, I can walk you into a top-rated commercial television station using a large Unix box with six ATM-over-SONET interfaces to drive video broadcast streams to the stations' live broadcast to millions of viewers. The same interfaces also transport TCP-IP application control data between Unix and the various off-line editing systems and the graphic development engines (MAC/W'95). You should not think that the prospect of internet based viewers are outside the planning horizion of commercial broadcast industry, even if that industry consists of predominately time critical (non-IP traffic) today. Some major players in this industry agree that the mixture of SONET/SDH with both IP and ATM traffic is "really keen". ..mike..