Correct, Ken. SONET is still king in this respect. Although it wouldn't surprise me to begin seeing one-off adaptations, at first, and then greater uptake, of IEEE and ANSI capabilities before long, such as Gigabit Ethernet, and IP over lambda, adding (substituting?) field routers for the ATM fabric in certain DSLAM functions.Hey, anything is possible if you throw enough bandwidth at it, creating a ceiling high enough to enable enough head room. [g]
Come to think of it, this might be more attractive for alternative providers in the future such as power companies and other utilities, municipalities, some cable cos, etc... but probably not for the incumbent LECs purposes, we'll have to wait and see. Maybe the LECs will jump on it when something else comes along to supplant IP. [no emoticons necessary here, I take it...]
I almost posted that FDDI might be a candidate for this, but on second thought, I don't think so - as a shared-media 100 Mb/s ring, it's far too slow. Whew! FDDI is far too slow. Hmm. That sure is a mouthful, but it's true.
If improvements are implemented on top of the basic NGDLC model, say, such as if a vendor chose to incorporate DWDM and selectively devote a number of wavelengths to formats other than (or in addition to) SONET, it would be entirely feasible. I think we'll see a lot of this before long, or as time goes by. Of course, we may have to first wait for this idea to become an anachronism first, but what else is knew?
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
