On Wed, 14 Jun 2000 dhudes@hudes.org wrote:
Isn't the push to MAE-ATM ? For better or worse -- the FDDI switch MAE can't hope to keep up when people are building OC-48 cross-country backbones. All that traffic goes someplace. It becomes expensive to have multiple ports on the FDDI switch paying for each.
Are there any other suggestions, other than ATM? Here in Sweden the exchange point is being replaced/extended using DPT/SRP (currently OC12, will be OC48 when cisco can deliver hardware). I have serious doubts that using this technology is the answer though, the rings become fairly large and I doubt it'll be efficient in the long run (even though it is better than FDDI at current traffic amounts). Gigabit ethernet sounds nice but the MTU of 1500 is really restricting that technology. I have heard rumours that 10gig ethernet will have at least 4000+ byte MTU, probably 9000+ which might make it viable to use for a shared medium exchange point as the hardware probably will be fairly cheap and/as it will be widely available supported by many vendors. Shared medium exchange points that work well must be the technology to be most economic as you can talk to several others using one interface instead of having to set up separate interfaces for each peering you want to establish? Isn't the lack of good technology here percieved as a threat to internet growth? -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se