Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 10:18:39 -0700 From: "Michel Py" <michel@arneill-py.sacramento.ca.us>
This box is the HFR which, according to the San Jose Mercury, is short for "Huge Fast Router". (Some reporter at the Merc probably still believes in the tooth fairy.)
Same as the BFR, I heard a different interpretation of the word in the middle :-)
As with many things, if you have to ask how much it costs before deciding to order it, you can't afford it.
You don't get it, me thinks. For lots of people here, networks are not a toy funded by the taxpayer's money, they're a tool to make money and popular wisdom that I have found being practiced here says that indeed you _do_ ask how much it costs before you buy it. I don't buy a million bucks peace of equipment because it looks cool and I just got funding. I buy a million bucks piece of equipment because I want ROI on it, and if the ROI is 500k over 5 years I actually don't buy it.
No, you don't get it (though I'll admit the statement is hyperbolic). If you need OC-768 connectivity, there is only one place to go today. If you really need it (and few do), you have the money to pay for it and a business that does not make existing hardware appropriate. I tend to suspect that the need for OC-768c is still rather limited. Most providers are primarily aggregators of massive numbers of small pipes. With almost no OC-768c Sonet gear in the field, my guess is that this gear will be used mostly by a handful of carriers who can make fiber available at minimal cost for dark fiber connectivity at major aggregation points. In the vast majority of the places where more bandwidth is needed, just adding more OC-192s (or even OC-48s) is often a more economical answer, especially if you own lots of excess fiber and/or WDM gear. As the the comments about "toys", yes, our network is taxpayer funded. It is run for the USDOE with federal funding; no CA state funds are involved. It is NOT a play network. It is a full-production high availability network which provides the only access to a number of very large and, in the view of some, very important facilities. It is an unusual network in terms of the volume of point to point flows. Things like fusion and high-energy physics generate simply astonishing amounts of data. Terabytes are not uncommon. We don't need OC-768 today, but we expect to need it in the next few years. -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634