Joe How many E1 customers can I plug into that device? You can take a cross section on this issue at various points. Think of the huge (sub RSP8) 7500 estates still in production, GSR Engine <5, 7609 <RSP720 and Flexwan1 and I think the early Juniper boxes - that can cope with todays size of routing table. The cost per prefix on those devices is very expensive indeed as the step upgrade driver for those devices is now the size o the table. We are all paying for it margin reduction... Regards, Neil -----Original Message----- From: Joe Abley <jabley@ca.afilias.info> Sent: 21 January 2008 00:15 To: William Herrin <herrin-nanog@dirtside.com> Cc: Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick@ianai.net>; nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Cost per prefix [was: request for help w/ ATT and terminology] A new cisco 2851 can be found for under $10k and can take a gig of RAM. If your goal is to have fine-grained routing data, and not to carry gigs of traffic, that particular router is perfectly adequate. If you're prepared to consider second-hand equipment (which seems fair, since it's not as though the real Internet has no eBay VXRs in it) you could get better performance, or lower cost, depending on which way you wanted to turn the dial. Sometimes it's important to appreciate that the network edge is bigger than the network core. Just because this kind of equipment wouldn't come close to cutting it in a carrier network doesn't mean that they aren't perfectly appropriate for a large proportion of deployed routers which take a full table. Joe