On Sun, 29 Aug 2004, Michel Py wrote:
1. Support: sometimes you will need vendor support, and this is especially true of new products. Putting Kingston DRAM in a 2600 is one thing; a limited test on a few routers will quickly show if it works or not, and the odds of an IOS upgrade that would suddenly trigger the third-party memory to cause problems are close to zero, as DRAM as long passed the development stage and is now a commodity.
OTOH, you won't have that many OC-192 IRs or LRs to play with. Maybe you'd try one third party PHY, then another one if the first one works, and so on. And suddenly something changes (which does happen with new products) and your vendor implements the changes on their PHYs but not on yours. You're screwed.
I can see the vendor's concern about support. But it seems pretty hollow when after they lock me into a specific SFP, to "help" me, they mark it up 4x or more--because they can. If it was really about better customer experience, they would "lock" it down to an approved list of 3rd-party products, any of which could be purchased off the open market. Or they would publish a list of approved and/or supported 3rd-party optics, like Cisco used to do. Those customers who wanted to get the endorsed OEM product could buy those. And customers who wanted to cut corners at the risk of losing jobs and lower-quality service could do so. I've not seen any efforts by vendors to do anything about 3rd-party optics other than to prohibit them. So the vendors that still support 3rd-party optics must not be experiencing excruciating pain. As discussed at a recent NANOG, the vendor-specified modifications to the optics are trivial and do not justify the proprietary lock-up or the mark-up (if they did, then you'd expect the vendors to patent them and not have to lock them up). Unfortunately the only way this will change, if it can change, is with customer pressure, and to a very small extent, competitive pressure. Hopefully enough large vendors will allow 3rd-party optics so the threat to buy from the other guy will be credible. Pete.