On 28-Feb-2008, at 01:56, Paul Wall wrote:
UU/MFS tried running IP on the 'protect' path of their SONET rings 10 years ago. It didn't work then.
Well, it works so long as whoever was trying to troubleshoot the circuits at 3am on US Thanksgiving understands that having the system "switch to protect" is quite bad, in the sense that it causes both sides to go down at once (I seem to remember there was a protect paths built for each side of the original ring using a loopback). Other than the unfamiliarity with the concept demonstrated by phone companies, I didn't notice any great fundamental problem with the idea. The extra 10G of capacity across the Atlantic was arguably more useful in the grand scheme of things than the being able to recover from a single-point failure at SONET speeds. It's probably fair to say there's more real-time traffic on the network today than there was then, however. I have never worked for UU/MFS, lest anybody draw that conclusion. Joe