Alan Hannan <hannan@bythetrees.com> writes:

...

Sprint recently announced that they are deploying 622Mbps POS cross-country links, and the GSRs are the only things you can put on the ends of such beasts that are available today.

This is untrue.

Other people have pointed out that the statement is perfectly true, but we can ignore the semantic misunderstanding. AFAICT there is only one orderable, deployable and tested IP router which observably terminates multiple 622-Mbit/s bit pipes, notably that made by cisco. One thing I find amusing is your own company's recent heavy investment in cisco's only likely competitor. Maybe this will mean cisco will stop paying so much attention to the ridiculous requirements UUWHO coughs up because it insists on a heavily meshed architechture for what has since become essentially purely political reasons, and start paying attention to people who are building sensible hierarchical networks that display much better scaling properties on nearly all fronts. (I hope so). Maybe this will also make people shy about helping Juniper because that translates directly into helping UUWHO as well. Who knows, maybe such things aren't so important, especially since the cisco product a/ works and b/ is *cheap*.

These can be disaggregated into OC3 ATM pipes that can be fed into many routers with proven technology and reliability. Granted, the disproportionality of the edge ckts to the backbone ckts provides for interesting flow aggregation dynamics, but it does work.

Oh sure it works if you turn LS IGPs on their head and try to avoid thinking too hard about how to build spanning trees without building a physical VC topology for multicast and can put up with interesting buffering and switching effects and, as you say, the dynamics of WHY it works vs. why it doesn't work when things break. I hate to say it but I think I have become old and this might explain why I like really simple and straightforward failure modes.

Your disdain for ATM does not stop its existence and use by the larger NSPs.

Technical merit has only been offered up as a reason for using cells by your organization and ATMNET, AFAIK. Everyone else who has been using ATM has done so because it was one of only three obvious scaling paths, with the other two being also gross (large numbers of parallel DS3s using load-balancing and flattening the network with lots of DS3s resembling lots of VCs, which is essentially what UUNET did with its physical topology anyway).

Aggressive statement, though the timbre is occasionally marked by usefulness. I wonder how the world would develop without Sean's input..... {music, clouds, harps... visions of ATM faeries dancing with sugarplums...}

Hahah. Well, don't forget the Russian and the Swede who also sang from the same songbook, and the other congregation members who were at NANOG meetings when everyone was angry at the BELLCORE twits prior to the NSFNET wind-down (hi Curtis). Many of the people who did actual engineering work at cisco were also not very agnostic when it came to cells, and had an effect on the company, which is one of the reasons I have always liked cisco compared to its competitors, who were not quite agnostic either but in the opposite direction.

There is another router vendor who has OC-12 router interfaces about ready for production. Another (#3) is expected to release a bang-up product real soon now.

As Peter Löthberg pointed out, there are BFRs in production right now. Sprint is also not the only vendor who is using them to move traffic, although the majority of other users are currently using the BFRs as really fast star-shaped LANs, essentially. (I expect this to change very soon)

There is a choice in the market today for OC12 router interfaces.

Not today there isn't. Maybe next month. There may be choice in what you can put at the end of an OC12 though, but it's either something smart or something you'd find at Hobson's Tavern. Sean.