-----Original Message----- From: smd@clock.org [mailto:smd@clock.org]

|Prabhu Kavi writes: | Someone asked earlier in this thread if it was cheaper to add | capacity or pay for the bright engineers to make TE or QoS work. | For large carriers, the right answer is often to pay for the | bright engineers.

Admittedly I have strong biases, but the engineers that I think are bright will tell large carriers that the right answer is to spend money on more capacity.

Sounds like we know different sets of bright engineers. My biases are that I worked for a Layer 2 switch vendor at the time, and our IP customers were primarily large ISPs.

What "we" believed in 1995-1997 about ATM cell tax and the like is no longer valid. Neither is what "they" believed about traffic management.

ATM is a tool. Some carriers used this tool in 95-97 for line-rate OC-12 forwarding and TE. Line-rate forwarding at OC-48+ rates is no longer an issue, and TE is available with MPLS, so ATM is not a very useful for IP traffic these days. However, TE is still a necessary tool for some carriers because "they" know it makes better financial sense for them than adding bandwidth. Your mileage may vary. Prabhu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Prabhu Kavi Phone: 1-978-264-4900 x125 Director, Adv. Prod. Planning Fax: 1-978-264-0671 Tenor Networks Email: prabhu_kavi@tenornetworks.com 100 Nagog Park WWW: www.tenornetworks.com Acton, MA 01720