-----Original Message----- From: Kevin Loch [mailto:kloch@opnsys.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2001 1:53 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: MPLS VPNs or not?

Diddn't PSInet deploy L2 switching massively throughout their network? What did the market decide about that? Could it be that UUNet's success was due to other factors? BTW, I'm not sure that #1 above was ever true in a large scale network.

KL

Like I said, to be succesful, you need to do many things right. And one of them having a sufficiently good sales team and market presence that you run into the problem where you have to scale your network rapidly to meet customer demand. UUNET had that problem (a good problem to have), tried a solution, and it worked for them. PSINet did not have this problem of outrunning L3 routers. #1 (running out of gas on the routers) was most definitely a problem at the time for a few providers. Remember that the most stable and widely deployed router in 1994-1997 could do about 300Kpps across the entire box. We've just come a long way since then. Prabhu