At 6:54 +0000 1/31/03, Vijay Gill wrote:
David Diaz <techlist@smoton.net> writes:
was to "pay" for what you used when you used it. The biggest technical factor was "how the heck do you bill it."
Actually I'd think the biggest technical factor would be the trained monkey that would sit at the switch and do OIR of line cards on the router as appropriate and reroute patches.
If a customer goes from their normal OC3 ---> OC12 for 4hrs three times in a month... what do you bill them for? Do you take it down to the DS0/min level and just multiple or do you do a flat rate or a per upgrade???
Does this include the monkey cost as the monkey switches the ports around? (well, technically you can get software switchable oc3/oc12 ports, but substitute for 48/192 and go from there)
No monkeys. I was referring to the protocols that people have been working on that automatically "reprovision" on the fly. The very simplistic view is (and this can be within your own network). Router A ---> Optical box/mesh ---> Router B Router A determines it needs to upgrade from OC3 to OC12 sends request and AUTH pwd ---> Optical mesh ----> Router B acks, says ok I do have capacity and your AUTH pwd verified ---> OC12 ---> Optical ---> OC12 ---> Router B Actually there are different ways to do this. It goes beyond what I was asking here. But I would be happy to expand on it. You can actually on day one have a OC48 handing off 1310nm to the Optical switch. The switch could then provision OC3s, OC12s off that. The switches Im speaking of do virtual concant., so they can slice and dice the pipe. Nothing says you have to use the whole thing on day 1. Actually that was sort of the point for a lot of people that were interested. They could have an OC48 and have 2 x OC12s off of that going to two different locations/peers. If peer numbers 3 and 4 show up at the mesh/box then it's a simple point and click to provision that as soon as they are hot. Sidenote: As far as monkeys go. You dont need a monkey since the protocol is theoretically doing it on the fly from layer3 down to layer1. Not to mention that CNM (customer network management) exists, which allows customers to actually have READ and WRITE privs on their "owned" circuits. So your own monkeys could do it with point and click. Neat thing from using this as a wholesale carrier is the ability to actually take an OC192, sell an OC48 to a customer, have that customer sell an OC12 off of that and so on. Everyone would have their own pwd that allows them to view their circuit and those "below" them but not above etc etc. It's off topic but interesting. My posted comment was concerning if this technology of layer3 to layer1 integration/communication would have exacerbated the mSQL worm as it might have had more ability to grab larger peering pipes. On last thought. On the "leaving spare capacity comment. If you might mean to say that OC48 ports on your router are much more expensive then OC12, and therefore with 20 peers, buying 20 x OC48 ports when u usually use an avg of OC12 on each is cost prohibitive, I can understand that. 1) how do you do it today with those peers, since you dont like the avg sustained model. 2) what if you had 20 x OC12 ports but had 1 space OC48 port that would dynamically make layer1 connections to whichever peer needed that capacity at that moment? Forgeting the BGP config issue for the moment on the layer3 side. Would this be an improvement? Basically a hot spare OC48 that could replace any of the OC12s on the fly? dave
The point was you could bump up on the fly as needed, capacity willing, then down. The obvious factor is having enough spare capacity in the bucket. This should not be an issue within the 4
And the monkey. I really don't have enough capital sitting around to leave a spare port idle for the 4 hours a day I need it.
This sort of addressed the "how do i design my backbone" argument. Where engineers ahve to decide whether to built for peak load and provide max QoS but also the highest cost backbone; or whether to built for avg sustained utilization. This way you can theoretically get the best of both worlds. As long as the billing goes along with that.
I don't plan to be buying service from anyone who is building to average sustained utilization (sic). My traffic tends to be bursty.
/vijay