Well, with the GSR (and alike) you're paying for high MTBF, large buffers and quick re-routing when something happens, so yes, this is a quality issue and that's why you should care and make an informed decision.
There's more than one way to do things. Some people manage MTBF by having more cheaper boxes in a resilient architecture so that the failure of a box has minimal impact on the transport of packets. Some people don't have buffers in their routers because they provide a consistently low latency service (low jitter). Some people do rerouting at the SDH layer so that routers don't need to reroute. Or they put a lot of effort into managing their lower layers so that failures happen very infrequently and therefore routers don't need to reroute. To make a truly informed decision you need hard data on network performance. Brands and models of routers are irrelevant. When I look at point-to-point latency graphs on a network and see constantly varying latency in almost a sine wave pattern, I know that the provider is doing something wrong. I may not know whether it is too-large buffers on the routers, congested circuit, or poorly managed underlying ATM/FR network, but the data tells the true story. If you care about quality, don't buy unless you can see hard data on the network's performance over a reasonable time period, i.e. 6 months to a year. And not everybody needs to care about quality that much. -Michael Dillon