On Sat, 29 May 2004, Gordon Cook wrote:
discussing. We don't pretend that QoS is easy or any kind of mature collection of technologies, but increasingly it looks as though the
Tier 1 operators do not do "best effort" really, at least not in their cores (and they have the SLAs to back it up). They buy hugely expensive top notch gear (Cisco 12000 (and now CRS:s) and Junipers) to get the big packet buffers, the fast reroutes and the full routing table lookups for each packet to avoid the pitfalls of flow forwarding the cheaper platforms have. With the advent of 10GE WAN PHY (Force10, Foundry, Riverstone, Extreme Networks, Cisco 7600) and full L3 lookup for each packet on their newer platforms, we'll see very much cheaper L2/L3 equipment being able to take advantage of existing OC192 infrastructure and that's where I think you'll start to see the real "best effort" networks operating at. At least the L2/L3 equipment will be much cheaper for the operators choosing this equipment, at approx 1/5 the initial investment of similar capacity 12400 and Juniper equipment. Now, how will this translate in cost compared to DWDM equipment and OPEX part of the whole equation? Well, the bubble effect is still doing fine, so I think we wont see any stability for yet another 2-3 years, I'll definately give you that in your analysis. As long as there is equipment and unused installed capacity left from 2000-2001 out there, the price equation will be skewed compared to what it actually costs to replentish the capacity when you've sold it. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se