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On Wed, 10 Sep 1997, Joseph T. Klein wrote:

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The routes issue historically comes down to the fact that Sprint did not want to convert from Cisco 4000 to Ciscos that had larger memory capacity. Memory is cheap these days ... the big boys just don't wish to have a free market.

I do not think sprint had 4000s in their backbone, they had AGS+ routers. The problem is not the lack of memory, but that the CPU can not process all the date in the memory when it needs to. The cisco 7500 have that same prob, sure you can put 256 megs of RAM in them, but can the CPU recalculate the next hop if most of that date in that RAM changes? The new RSP4 card may have solved that, we may be at a point now where the router has enough processor to be able to process all the data it has stored in memory and do it quickly.

AGS+'s only could handle 16meg, the cpu in a AGS+ is the same as in a 7000 series, (motorola 68040) As of a year ago, I believe I heard that sprint still had AGS+'s in their backbone and were upgrading them to 7000 series equipment.

-- Jason Jason Vanick ------------------------------------------ jvanick@megsinet.net Network Operations Manager V: 312-245-9015 MegsInet, Inc. 225 West Ohio St. Suite #400 Chicago, Il 60610

In 1992 Sprintlink had AGS+ routers in it's network, so did everyone else. The AGS+'es where replaced by 7000's with 64M and SSE's and then 'downgraded' to 75xx routers with 128M. The current Sprintlink core is a mix of 75xx routers with 128M and VIP2/80-POS oc3c interfaces and cisco 12000 routers with 256M and oc3c and oc12c. -Peter