Stephen Sprunk <stephen@sprunk.org> wrote:

Ah, but who's to say that all PTP links are WANs? Are you really going to run an OC-48 from one router to another _in the same building_ when you need 1Gb/s between them?

Can't say - I have never needed that much bandwidth. :) I still live in an alternate Universe where 10 Mbps coaxial Ethernet for LANs is near- infinity and 2 Mbps or so makes for a *very* sweet WAN. The facility housing the mail server from which I am sending this message is connected to the outside Inet via a 384 kbps SDSL pipe which I am using basically as ARPANET replacement - I miss the ARPANET. If I wanted a PTP link between two routers in the same building that runs at the same speed as my Ethernet (10 Mbps), I would use EIA-422 (which is rated up to 10 Mbps) and run something HDLC-based over it.

Even for MANs or WANs, the price of a pipe (plus equipment at each end) will still often be significantly lower for Ethernet than for "real" circuits

Wait a moment here. With a MAN/WAN involving wires/fiber running over public property, what one is paying for is the right to use those wires for your data, right? The wires themselves do NOT run Ethernet at the electrical level, so if you have some "MAN/WAN Ethernet" service, there is a black box of some kind that converts the native electrical signal format to Ethernet. Why not take that black box out of service, use it for baseball practice (Office Space style), and use the exact same wires/fiber (rented at exactly the same monthly recurring price) in its native non-Ethernet form? IOW, if you are renting dry copper / dark fiber, you have a choice to use it either through a stinky "black box" Ethernet converter or in the native non-Ethernet form directly, but the monthly recurring cost remains exactly the same.

Well, it'd certainly be nice if someone would make something even cheaper than Ethernet for that purpose (which would squeeze out a few more bits of payload), but so far nobody has. It's hard to beat Ethernet on volume, and that's the main determinant of cost/price...

But that's non-recurring equipment cost only, and at least in my case the little investment in V.35 etc hardware is a much lower cost than the price of pain and suffering with Ethernet for a purist like me. MS