is there a market for this?

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1

I have a friend who's in the high speed optoelectronics biz and
already does lots of OC-[N] equipment, and I mentioned to him that I
thought that there was probably a market for PCI cards that spoke IP
over OC-3/OC-12. Before I strongly encourage him to do this, I was
curious as to whether anyone else felt there was a real market for
such things.

Perry

2

I was (somewhat) following a dicussion about high speed communications
handled over the PCI bus, and there's a company that makes T1/T3-level
serial cards for PC's, and from what they were saying, there's no way to
reach even a full T3 worth of bandwidth on a PCI bus, so I think trying to
push an OC-# connection over it might be pushing it a bit :wink:

Chris

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3

I don't know if there is a market for such things. Things would be different
if one could get OC-N switch to plug such things into... There is also issues
with PCI bus bandwidth limitation and such..

-dorian

4

This is not true. PCI bus bandwidth budget modulo overhead is about 400 MBps.
There maybe architectural limitations of some PC motherboards that could cause
the above, but PCI bus by itself can do OC3 just fine.

After all, we've been able to generate full line rate level of traffic on a
dual P166 with a fast ethernet card.

When you have need more than a single port, you may run into problems at OCN
rates, however.

-dorian

5

Actually, I've seen a PCI-based box doing 15MByte/sec sustained read/write
to disk, so it is possible to do it, but it's not likely to be standard
for quite a while. I certainly think that an OC-12 card would be overkill
though. I'm also wondering why someone who can afford an OC-x would be
trying to save a couple bucks by using a PCI-based router.
Once you get into this type of bandwidth, I think a bus becomes a serious
chokepoint.

6

Check out www.vbns.net page on the OC-3 monitor. OC3 over PCI.

-scott

7

I'm not sure how fast the PCI bus is but, I don't think it'd be worth
while having it at 155M...never mind the 620M.

Brian