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.
They are also the people _least_ likely to be impressed by
money as the currency "to pay for" them. Being taken seriously
despite having very non-bell-head ideas, and having an environment
in which traditional thinking does not win every argument, is
usually much more important.
I've done some non-TE work for a couple of networks, and
the only bandwidth-constraint they have run into on the
technical front has been switching capacity of routers.
Yeah, you sometimes have to fight to "remove" fun features
like 1+1 protection and monitoring, but this can be done
even in the most traditional of telcos, as demonstrated by
various people over the years.
Of course, the same amount of bandwidth they had then
would now cost much less, and be considered a small network,
and the results today could well be different.
In my necks of the woods the retail pricing of international
TDM (PDH, SDH, WDM) capacity eroded something like this:
1993 - T1 capacity, 9-12 cents/channel-mile
1994 - T3 capacity, 6-9 cents/channel-mile
1995 - OC3 capacity, 3-4 cents/channel-mile
1997 - (intl) E3/T3, midpoint, $4M (US) we don't count in channel-miles
...
2001 - $4M (US) gets you a multi-city optical subnet at 2.5Gbps
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is no longer valid.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.
100 Nagog Park WWW: www.tenornetworks.com
Wow I misread this street address several times... lysdexia, I guess.
Sean.