On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
Thus spake "Vadim Antonov" <avg@exigengroup.com>
Actually, not. A router is a hell of a lot simpler than a Class-5 switch, particularly if you don't do ATM, FR, X.25, MPLS, QoS, multicast, IPv6, blah, blah, blah.
The data plane is remarkably easier. The control plane is arguable.
That's synchronous, jitter-controlled data plane, not the asynchronous, potentially lossy data plane as in routers. The difference complexity-wise is significant. That's why people are able to get much higher speeds in packet switches than in voice switches. As for the control plane... I also thought call control to be easy, until I started to learn about it as a part of my job at Genesys Labs (the leading CTI vendor). The seemingly small number of features (call progress, hold, forwarding, one-step and two-step transfers, conference calls, predictive dialing, etc, etc, etc) combine exponentially to produce huge number of states and possible race conditions. Add to that strong real-time constraints imposed (foolishly, perhaps) by signaling system protocols, the resource allocation (as opposed to best-effort behaviour) the real fault-tolerance, accurate accounting requirements, interfacing with large-scale CMS, and you get the picture.
And without ATM, FR, MPLS, QOS, multicast, etc. nobody will be buying your router.
Yep. Because of the need to integrate with all kinds of OFRV powered feature-rich networks, not because of any rational need to have those features in the first place. Microsoft did that to software. Cisco is doing that to networking. Being a cynic, I do own some Cisco stock, and wait for Mr. Chambers to figure out that producing boxes which won't break in few years erodes company's profits by forcing it to compete against its own old models. Quite a few people are quite happy with CGS-es on their T-1s :) eBAY prices on perfectly good routers are great, too [tongue firmly in cheek].
The question is actually whether anyone would pay the cost of a perfect router. People complain that today's routers are too expensive, and most vendors are going bankrupt or giving up. Many of those were marketing to the "featureless and reliable" niche.
I'm not aware of any whose marketing wasn't focused on the feature checklist. Not in carrier or enterprise space. In SOHO segment Linksys is making a killing with their cheap boxes. Note that "perfect router" to me is the one which you plug in and spend 30 seconds configuring, after which it just works. Your mileage may vary, but I strongly suspect that a bookshelf full of manuals is not a desireable attribute of a perfect anything. --vadim