MAE-East congestion seems a good opportunity for ASND
WorldCom and the ISPs have identified the problems as
head-of-line blocking, which causes pipes into the exchange
point to jam up, resulting in packets being dropped, and
congestion. Dropped packets mean ISPs have to dedicate more
resources to retransmitting, which, in turn, wastes bandwidth.
Nowhere is the dramatic growth of the Internet felt more
strongly than at WorldCom's MAE-East, in Vienna, Va.; the
busiest MAE.
Packet loss at MAE-East has recently approached 40%. As a
result ISPs that link to the MAE to exchange traffic with other
ISPs are screaming for upgrades. WorldCom, which got the job
of fixing the MAEs when it bought original architect MFS
Communications Co., Inc., has answered the call with more
Digital Equipment Corp. FDDI GIGAswitches, but most
observers believe FDDI's days are numbered.
Past and present
Less than four years ago, MAE-East had a single GIGAswitch.
Today, it has seven - three of them deployed this year as the
first part of the MAEs' overhaul.
To put further packet loss at bay, MAE technicians recently
revamped the MAE-East architecture. What was simply a ring
of GIGAswitches strung together has been rearchitected to a
mesh formation with one switch at the core.
"We've also dispersed high-load customers to reduce the
stress on a single switch," said Larry Walberg, director of global
network operations at WorldCom.
Despite these fixes, WorldCom believes MAE-East still will
reach full capacity by January, said Dan Lasater, vice president
of broadband applications at WorldCom. But if even one
exchange point is going to reach full capacity in a handful of
months, why invest millions in FDDI?
This question has many scratching their heads.
There are really only three technology choices for MAE and
NAP operators today -- ATM, Gigabit Ethernet and IP over
Synchronous Optical Network (SONET), said Tim Weingarten,
research associate at BancAmerica Robertson Stephens, a San
Francisco-based consulting firm. |
