On Tue, 21 Oct 1997, Dorian R. Kim wrote:
Then perhaps it might of interest to start a meta discussion about problems of scalability of Gigaswitch based exchange points as well as possible future direction of such large exchange points?
The two primary questions to answer this are "What technology is readily available?", and "What is the anticipated need?". It would be nice if MFS gave historical data at http://www.mfst.com/MAE/west.stats.html in a format like MRTG does, rather than just listing weekly traffic ad naseum. Already a factor of 10 capacity is available from DEC in their new Gigabit ethernet Gigaswitches. The new 12 slot chasis supposedly will run around $9500, and a two port Gigibit ethernet adapter will supposedly retail for around $4500 (there also is a multiport 100 base T card). This is much cheaper than the FDDI Gigaswitch pricing per port. Further, yet another factor of 10 is supposedly around the corner from the company Packet Engines, which has a 10 Gbps ethernet(!) card in development for their gigabit ethernet switch. Both of these developments, coupled with the fact that long distance pricing appears to not be dropping much (and therefore limiting the amount of bandwith brought to an exchange), should make the exchanges much more likely to be able to handle to load. +------------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -------------------+ | Mike Leber Direct Internet Connections Voice 408 282 1540 | | Hurricane Electric Web Hosting & Co-location Fax 408 971 3340 | | mleber@he.net http://www.he.net | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+