On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Kavi, Prabhu wrote:
I don't think UUNET considered it a waste. UUNET could not have grown as quickly as it did during the mid to late 90s without L2 (Frame and ATM) technologies. Fortunately for them, they did not have any pure IP only zealots that prevented the pragmatic use of other technologies in their networks.
Did I ever argue against L2 switching? It is a fine way to do traffic aggregation/deaggregation. Just don't do _routing_ with that.
Otherwise they probably would not have been able to outrun the other ISPs.
UUNET received two benefits from it:
1. Speed, since at the time L2 switches were faster than routers, and
Ghm. FR boxen were cheaper, not faster. ATM at some point was faster, but was (still is?) quite flaky. Networks i engineered had plenty of L2 switches in them - for clustering in POPs.
2. Traffic engineering, which saved them money in transport costs.
TE at the cost of 20% of available bandwidth wasted to cell tax? You must be kidding. Do not forget that TE could be done at SONET level, too.
I guess the real question should be how much market cap did other companies lose because of certain people's zealotry? Any answers Vadim?
Absolutely. Stupidity of your regular analysts, who were rewarding companies investing into the latest overhyped crap. I hope these times are over by now, and companies will actually start looking at the bottom line. Now, if you find an example of a network going down _because_ of pure-IP design (not because of stupid business tactics such as overexpansion, idiotic acquisitions, or simple mismanagement), i'll agree with you. So far, most of networks which went down (or were acquired at bargain prices) were hybrid designs. Also note that UUNET _did not_ survive as an independent ISP. I know few ex-UUNET folks who weren't very thrilled because of that. --vadim