Prabhu Kavi writes: | Someone asked earlier in this thread if it was cheaper to add | capacity or pay for the bright engineers to make TE or QoS work. | For large carriers, the right answer is often to pay for the | bright engineers. Admittedly I have strong biases, but the engineers that I think are bright will tell large carriers that the right answer is to spend money on more capacity. They are also the people _least_ likely to be impressed by money as the currency "to pay for" them. Being taken seriously despite having very non-bell-head ideas, and having an environment in which traditional thinking does not win every argument, is usually much more important. I've done some non-TE work for a couple of networks, and the only bandwidth-constraint they have run into on the technical front has been switching capacity of routers. Yeah, you sometimes have to fight to "remove" fun features like 1+1 protection and monitoring, but this can be done even in the most traditional of telcos, as demonstrated by various people over the years. | Of course, the same amount of bandwidth they had then | would now cost much less, and be considered a small network, | and the results today could well be different. In my necks of the woods the retail pricing of international TDM (PDH, SDH, WDM) capacity eroded something like this: 1993 - T1 capacity, 9-12 cents/channel-mile 1994 - T3 capacity, 6-9 cents/channel-mile 1995 - OC3 capacity, 3-4 cents/channel-mile 1997 - (intl) E3/T3, midpoint, $4M (US) we don't count in channel-miles ... 2001 - $4M (US) gets you a multi-city optical subnet at 2.5Gbps What "we" believed in 1995-1997 about ATM cell tax and the like is no longer valid. Neither is what "they" believed about traffic management. | 100 Nagog Park WWW: www.tenornetworks.com Wow I misread this street address several times... lysdexia, I guess. Sean.