Mike Trest (In Japan) wrote:
At 06:32 AM 3/21/98 -0800, Sean M. Doran wrote:
| Native IP over fiber is not a religion; it's a solid engineering. snip<
SDH/SONET is also a really keen way of sharing a network among IP and other things on the wide-area side, and an even keener way of having access to relatively low-speed customer data on the more local side.
Both in US and In Japan, SONET/SDH systems are used to deliver such non-IP traffic as CATV/Video over the same physical facilities as IP traffic.
If your on TCG fiber in the Boston area chances are very likely your IPpackets are squeezed in between "The US versus Larry Flint" care of MediaOne SONET :)
Indeed, I can walk you into a top-rated commercial television station using a large Unix box with six ATM-over-SONET interfaces to drive video broadcast streams to the stations' live broadcast to millions of viewers. The same interfaces also transport TCP-IP application control data between Unix and the various off-line editing systems and the graphic development engines (MAC/W'95).
You should not think that the prospect of internet based viewers are outside the planning horizion of commercial broadcast industry, even if that industry consists of predominately time critical (non-IP traffic) today.
Some major players in this industry agree that the mixture of SONET/SDH with both IP and ATM traffic is "really keen".
..mike..